The Story of Unix - Chapter Ω: The Captains All Jumped Ship

There used to be this philosophy, that some people called an Operating System, ... The people who came up with the idea weren't so besotted with it as those who followed and they set out to do it better. That was called Plan-9 from Bell Labs. Ever since the Unix ship has just been sailing around, who knows where? Don't ask any of the crew. And Plan-9?

Unix came with a new programming language and a new way to write programs, by composing them together using shell scripts. Plan-9 didn't. The Viewpoints Research Institute STEPS project was the sort of thing Plan-9 needed, but Viewpoints was terminated in 2018.


Douglas Hofstadter gave a talk related to this idea:

 

See Douglas Hofstadter on Recursive Functions and The Abstraction Ceiling.

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