4 ms·

Where would somebody like Gosling go to find a home? In other words, what Sun-like industry Research and Development centers (not just research shops or applica

by strlen 17y ago

Where would somebody like Gosling go to find a home? In other words, what Sun-like industry Research and Development centers (not just research shops or application software vendors) remain? Microsoft the software company has a competing technology to sell you. Microsoft Research does not ship code. IBM and HP are professional services, not technology R&D companies. RedHat's JBoss division had been (very positively) driving the direction of Java EE, but they're much more of a consulting/software vendor (focused on enterprise software, not on programming languages) than an R&D shop. Google would be the most likely candidate: they use Java extensively, make their own JVM and contribute to Apache Harmony. They do highly advanced R&D work (you could say they're the modern day Bell Labs), but most fruits of it are internal (with some work ending up as research papers and a very tiny fraction going out as open source). Seems like something is missing: a first-class R&D shop that's a home to top technologists (who aren't interested wealth through entrepreneurship, but would rather work on many different, challenging projects -- something focused start-ups can't provide) and which ships software and hardware to the world. I'd love to see Google step up to that plate, but is that realistic?

davi 17y ago
you could say they're the modern day Bell Labs I think this comparison is unduly favorable to Google. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Discoveries_and_developments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Discoveries_and_devel...
- strlen 17y ago
  Certainly agreed. I could say "a modern day runner-up to Bell Labs". Nonetheless they employ actual Bell labs people (Rob Pike, Kernighan, etc...).
  - hga 17y ago
    And Pike and Ken Thompson have gifted us with Go (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28programming_language%29).
    - known 17y ago
      And Google doesn't use Go in their production systems.
      - hga 17y ago
        Well ... UNIX back in the old days was something of a moonlight or stealth project. Then they got money for an original PDP-11 (later the 11/20) for a specific project or task, serious text processing as I recall, and that lead to the money for their PDP-11/45 (significant since its split I and D allowed for 64KB of code, 56KB of data and 8KB of stack (the latter split due to the 45's MMU), significant because that allowed much larger programs to be written (as I recall the 11/20's architecture left the last 8KB for devices)). That's why nroff (from a Multics program, as I recall) and troff were such a big thing back then, troff would output to a professional phototypesetter. And they had upstream piped software that would DTRT with e.g. typesetting math. And this was practical, all parts of AT&T had a lot of manuals and papers to produce. At some later point, AT&T/Bell Labs realized they had something seriously useful here, and the research people got funding for OS work while Western Electric forked UNIX for AT&T production work. (You can find this all in the appropriate histories, I know it from them and from starting with V6 in the summer of 1978 and writing my final project in nroff for a XEROX Daisywheel printer.) Anyway, my point here, going back to the original point, was that Bell Labs per se was much more of a pure research lab, and it was the job of Western Electric to turn some of their output into stuff they'd use in the system. And Bell Labs was a tacit part of the monopoly agreement that gave AT&T all the telephony business in the US that they wanted, it was "a price of doing business". That's why they couldn't sell research UNIX (Vx) for real money, things like the transistor weren't locked down with evil patent terms, etc. etc. In other words, not a situation we expect to see repeated after the '80s breakup. Right now Go is in an alpha stage (significant parts are missing and known to be needed, code you write will get broken) ... we should perhaps judge it more by guessing whether Google will eventually use it if and when it's of production quality. In the meanwhile, we can look at them as a fairly unique company that really understands that technology is a competitive advantage and that having some of that be open source is good for them. See Joel S. on how companies desire to commoditize their supporting technologies. Google's open source browser and mobile phone and netbook OS projects are examples them doing very directed projects that support their real business. Indirectly they do things like hire Mr. Python.
grrrr 17y ago
IBM does do research, and plenty of it. Quantum Computing anyone? http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/ http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/
- strlen 17y ago
  Does the result of this research end up as products? Microsoft Research is excellent as a research organization, but it seems that it's goal isn't to develop new products based on this research but rather to make sure that the scientists aren't developing products based on their research elsewhere. Note: there's also lots of research work that needs to be done that isn't going to be applied immediately. That's certainly fine -- but there's been research that has went on at Sun that has been turned into industry changing products (from NFS to Java).
  - sern 17y ago
    Yes. Off the top of my head, IBM invented hard disks, relational databases and RISC. They definitely aren't as innovative now as they were thirty years ago, but at least they have more to show than Oracle does.
    - strlen 17y ago
      From what I've read, IBM was a top-notch R&D company up until the late 90s/early 2000s (with all the innovations you mentioned, as well as literally writing the book on software development -- they were in no way a pure research shop). Since then they've transformed into a professional services company, however (although they've always been known for having great sales/professional services).
hga 17y ago
Microsoft funds a lot of fairly pure research with some of it slipping out into the real world, e.g. Simon Peyton-Jones http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ of Glasgow Haskell Compiler fame (and perhaps the most interesting interview in Coders at Work, although that has a lot to do with my familiarity of the work of others in the Lisp and PARC worlds). One of the biggest complaints about Microsoft Research (or whatever it's called) was how little gets out of the lab into the "real world", with things like F# being recent exceptions, and their funding of the GHC is another example of how they indirectly ship code. Although this mostly legit complaint is precisely your complaint about "not just research shops". I'm pretty sure IBM is still doing some tech R&D, how much in the coding area I'm not sure, let alone for how long. Hmmm, has such a beast other than Sun for a brief time ever existed? Obviously Bell Labs, and the UCB Unix project (and some other DARPA projects that had useful code as a required deliverable, e.g. their general VLSI infrastructure push: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project). MIT's exokernel project found itself reified in the real world as Xen, through yet another university lab. Plus today there are other business models, e.g. look at Clojure (admittedly a one man project for the first few years), the cost of doing a R&D project that ships real world code is fantastically lower than it used to be when e.g. XEROX PARC was doing most? of its work on bit slice (i.e. not too fast) 16 bit Altos with 1-4 banks of 64KB RAM. I came to the conclusion in the early '80s that some of the differences in the granularity of traditional Lisp and Smalltalk objects (the latter are larger) is in part due to the machines these people did their work on. Lisp has always gone for a big flat address space, Smalltalk had bank switching to contend with an I think that encouraged larger objects (larger than a cons cell, atom, numeric immediate, etc. The architecture of X has a lot more to do with GAO "most preferred customer" rules/law than anything else.
- strlen 17y ago
  I'll make sure to re-read that interview (Simon Peyton Jones), thanks! There's certainly something to be said about it being possible -- more so now than ever -- for hackers to work alone, without affiliation with a large R&D organization or academia. Rich Hickey's work has been amazing and will be influential (the persistent immutable data structures are beginning to spread beyond Clojure). It's also interesting that Hickey was able to "bootstrap" himself from consulting rather than full-time work, regaining full rights to his work (not being subject to the all-too-common agreements which require one to give the fruit of all of their ideas to their employer). Academia is still doing well (Scala from EPFL, some fairly interesting distributed systems work going on at Berkeley) and there are also university-based spin-offs e.g., Stonebraker start-ups (even though I disagree with some of his approaches, it's still great to see companies built to solve difficult and interesting problems). Historically these have been big on the West Coast: Google, Inktomi, Ousterhout's start-ups (Scriptics, Electric Cloud). I haven't seen any emerge recently, but perhaps I haven't been looking in the right places (or have been too cynical about what I saw).
known 17y ago
Where would somebody like Gosling go to find a home? I think it depends on the road-map of java

by strlen 17y ago

davi 17y ago

you could say they're the modern day Bell Labs I think this comparison is unduly favorable to Google. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Discoveries_and_developments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Discoveries_and_devel...

strlen 17y ago
Certainly agreed. I could say "a modern day runner-up to Bell Labs". Nonetheless they employ actual Bell labs people (Rob Pike, Kernighan, etc...).
- hga 17y ago
  And Pike and Ken Thompson have gifted us with Go (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28programming_language%29).
  - known 17y ago
    And Google doesn't use Go in their production systems.
    - hga 17y ago
      Well ... UNIX back in the old days was something of a moonlight or stealth project. Then they got money for an original PDP-11 (later the 11/20) for a specific project or task, serious text processing as I recall, and that lead to the money for their PDP-11/45 (significant since its split I and D allowed for 64KB of code, 56KB of data and 8KB of stack (the latter split due to the 45's MMU), significant because that allowed much larger programs to be written (as I recall the 11/20's architecture left the last 8KB for devices)). That's why nroff (from a Multics program, as I recall) and troff were such a big thing back then, troff would output to a professional phototypesetter. And they had upstream piped software that would DTRT with e.g. typesetting math. And this was practical, all parts of AT&T had a lot of manuals and papers to produce. At some later point, AT&T/Bell Labs realized they had something seriously useful here, and the research people got funding for OS work while Western Electric forked UNIX for AT&T production work. (You can find this all in the appropriate histories, I know it from them and from starting with V6 in the summer of 1978 and writing my final project in nroff for a XEROX Daisywheel printer.) Anyway, my point here, going back to the original point, was that Bell Labs per se was much more of a pure research lab, and it was the job of Western Electric to turn some of their output into stuff they'd use in the system. And Bell Labs was a tacit part of the monopoly agreement that gave AT&T all the telephony business in the US that they wanted, it was "a price of doing business". That's why they couldn't sell research UNIX (Vx) for real money, things like the transistor weren't locked down with evil patent terms, etc. etc. In other words, not a situation we expect to see repeated after the '80s breakup. Right now Go is in an alpha stage (significant parts are missing and known to be needed, code you write will get broken) ... we should perhaps judge it more by guessing whether Google will eventually use it if and when it's of production quality. In the meanwhile, we can look at them as a fairly unique company that really understands that technology is a competitive advantage and that having some of that be open source is good for them. See Joel S. on how companies desire to commoditize their supporting technologies. Google's open source browser and mobile phone and netbook OS projects are examples them doing very directed projects that support their real business. Indirectly they do things like hire Mr. Python.

grrrr 17y ago

IBM does do research, and plenty of it. Quantum Computing anyone? http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/ http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/

strlen 17y ago
Does the result of this research end up as products? Microsoft Research is excellent as a research organization, but it seems that it's goal isn't to develop new products based on this research but rather to make sure that the scientists aren't developing products based on their research elsewhere. Note: there's also lots of research work that needs to be done that isn't going to be applied immediately. That's certainly fine -- but there's been research that has went on at Sun that has been turned into industry changing products (from NFS to Java).
- sern 17y ago
  Yes. Off the top of my head, IBM invented hard disks, relational databases and RISC. They definitely aren't as innovative now as they were thirty years ago, but at least they have more to show than Oracle does.
  - strlen 17y ago
    From what I've read, IBM was a top-notch R&D company up until the late 90s/early 2000s (with all the innovations you mentioned, as well as literally writing the book on software development -- they were in no way a pure research shop). Since then they've transformed into a professional services company, however (although they've always been known for having great sales/professional services).

hga 17y ago

Microsoft funds a lot of fairly pure research with some of it slipping out into the real world, e.g. Simon Peyton-Jones http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ of Glasgow Haskell Compiler fame (and perhaps the most interesting interview in Coders at Work, although that has a lot to do with my familiarity of the work of others in the Lisp and PARC worlds). One of the biggest complaints about Microsoft Research (or whatever it's called) was how little gets out of the lab into the "real world", with things like F# being recent exceptions, and their funding of the GHC is another example of how they indirectly ship code. Although this mostly legit complaint is precisely your complaint about "not just research shops". I'm pretty sure IBM is still doing some tech R&D, how much in the coding area I'm not sure, let alone for how long. Hmmm, has such a beast other than Sun for a brief time ever existed? Obviously Bell Labs, and the UCB Unix project (and some other DARPA projects that had useful code as a required deliverable, e.g. their general VLSI infrastructure push: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project). MIT's exokernel project found itself reified in the real world as Xen, through yet another university lab. Plus today there are other business models, e.g. look at Clojure (admittedly a one man project for the first few years), the cost of doing a R&D project that ships real world code is fantastically lower than it used to be when e.g. XEROX PARC was doing most? of its work on bit slice (i.e. not too fast) 16 bit Altos with 1-4 banks of 64KB RAM. I came to the conclusion in the early '80s that some of the differences in the granularity of traditional Lisp and Smalltalk objects (the latter are larger) is in part due to the machines these people did their work on. Lisp has always gone for a big flat address space, Smalltalk had bank switching to contend with an I think that encouraged larger objects (larger than a cons cell, atom, numeric immediate, etc. The architecture of X has a lot more to do with GAO "most preferred customer" rules/law than anything else.

strlen 17y ago
I'll make sure to re-read that interview (Simon Peyton Jones), thanks! There's certainly something to be said about it being possible -- more so now than ever -- for hackers to work alone, without affiliation with a large R&D organization or academia. Rich Hickey's work has been amazing and will be influential (the persistent immutable data structures are beginning to spread beyond Clojure). It's also interesting that Hickey was able to "bootstrap" himself from consulting rather than full-time work, regaining full rights to his work (not being subject to the all-too-common agreements which require one to give the fruit of all of their ideas to their employer). Academia is still doing well (Scala from EPFL, some fairly interesting distributed systems work going on at Berkeley) and there are also university-based spin-offs e.g., Stonebraker start-ups (even though I disagree with some of his approaches, it's still great to see companies built to solve difficult and interesting problems). Historically these have been big on the West Coast: Google, Inktomi, Ousterhout's start-ups (Scriptics, Electric Cloud). I haven't seen any emerge recently, but perhaps I haven't been looking in the right places (or have been too cynical about what I saw).

known 17y ago

Where would somebody like Gosling go to find a home? I think it depends on the road-map of java