strangest systems I've sent email from

[Brian L. Stuart]

On Wed, 4/27/16, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> ... with a few weirdos saying that 6809 was better than
> ... and a few weirdos maintained that Forth was better.
> ... while the weirdoes use FreeBSD.

I've never been more proud to be classified as a weirdo :)

> The efforts to fix and improve Unix -- Plan 9, Inferno -- forgotten.

Plan 9 and Inferno are still around.  There are quite a few of
us who still use them on a regular basis.  In fact, the Plan 9
updates for the new Pi 3 should be out very soon, and I have
a student currently working on a port of Plan 9 to the Allwinner
A20 found in the Banana Pi and several of the low-end tablets.

> That makes me despair.
 
I feel much the same way, but it leads me to a little different place.
While I'll probably never be there entirely, I am now at a point where
I am giving serious thought to only running software I write myself.
For example, the file system I run on my home file server (a Plan 9
box) is something I wrote myself.  The version of Scheme I use on
Inferno is one I wrote, etc.  The truth is if you're willing to be one
of the weirdos, there are still some pretty interesting places to be
in the computing world.  There are still interesting languages both
old and new to learn.  (I had a blast last summer working with MCPL,
an experimental offshoot of BCPL, and the ENIAC simulator I'm
developing is written in Go.)  I find life to be much more enjoyable
and my blood pressure to be much lower as long as I steer away
from anything that's mainstream or popular.

BLS