I love this. These projects almost certainly ultimately fail, get laughed at, and then end up educating us anyway, whether for what to do or what not to do. I expect I'll probably see some hilarious things from it early on, laugh at it's idealism and mistakes, and in 10 years I'll be using tech designed by it's apostles.

reminds me of Plan9.

We all talk about how silly it is and has been for years, while simultaneously extolling the values behind the development ideas that Plan 9 follows, and the good practices it teaches in regards to OS development.

No one I know, who knows enough about systems to know what Plan9 is, looked so little into the details such that they find it "silly".

I call it silly too. While also admiring many of its ideals.

Hurd might have been a better example.

who calls Plan9 silly?

It's named after a movie dubbed by some as the worst movie ever made.

So I think it's fair to call it "silly", regardless of its more serious virtues.

So you're saying its creators think it's silly? It has a sense of humor, apparently, but I don't think that's the sense of "Plan 9 is silly" the GP is asking about, or even related to it.

Of course, we've been told that a clean-slate design is doomed to failure. But we believe that all traditional OSs have failed and are unfixable. If this is the case, there really is no alternative to clean slate.