What Is Not in Plan Nine (2012)
The comment about Rio vs X Windows would make a lot more sense if you could do the same things in Plan 9 as you could in X Windows. Motif was a giant sack of crap, but you could make an application that was roughly identifiable as a &quot;computer application&quot; of the time to a non-technical user, and even customize&#x2F;internationalize it (more or less). You&#x27;d pretty much be hand-painting every last UI widget in Plan 9. Ridiculous.<p>Also this comparison was often used as a celebration of not having objects, C++, shared libs, etc. on Plan 9. Again, this would be less ridiculous if any of the large complex things done on other systems that merited shared libs had ever been done at <i>all</i> on Plan 9.<p>Unfortunately, many of the good ideas in Plan 9 sank alongside this. If they had made &quot;APE&quot; a first-class project they wouldn&#x27;t have been swivelling back and forth from non-Plan 9 boxes to use the web and the better ideas might have grown into something. :-(