Plan 9's improvement is called Inferno, by the same devs.

It's not Plan9's improvement. It was never designed that way. It's a stand alone product. It has nowhere near the richness of Plan9.

Source: I worked as an Inferno developer.

> I worked as an Inferno developer.

Ah man, that's really cool.

So what's your favorite operating system? Is there one you find ideal or do you like different ones for their different trade-offs? What do you wish was the most widely used OS in the world?

I ask these questions thinking of the OS foundations and ignoring that OSes like Plan9 and Inferno are lacking many things only found in more popular OSes by virtue of being popular.

Plan9 was far superior as a developer's system. It's text based tools are the best, bar none. But really it owes that to Project Oberon.

"Everything is a file" as an abstraction enables you to build really powerful through composition. e.g. running TCP/IP over a serial connection just by mounting files in certain places.

Your end user program doesn't need to know anything about networking, it just reads from files.

this is an irc bot written in shell script

http://proweb.co.uk/~matt/chugly.rc

It's not perfect, of course, it had problems with throughput - we were forever discussing at conferences how to improve the protocol to implement streaming.

I describe it as a racing car, not everyone can drive it, you need to work to keep it going, you might kill yourself but when you're out front, it feels amazing.

> Your end user program doesn't need to know anything about networking, it just reads from files.

Basically, suckless's ii seems to imitate that.

Interesting that you put it that way, as I don't get where Plan 9 gets to be richer than Inferno.