4 ms·

The polemic aged remarkably well

• cryptonector 8y ago
  Is that sarcasm? Cause I think it must be. Pike says (well, said, in 2000) there's been nothing new in GUIs. Fine, he was right in 2000. Then the iPhone and iOS happened just a few years later. Oops. Or how about this: > It has reached the point where I doubt that a brilliant systems project would even be funded, and if funded, wouldn’t find the bodies to do the work. The odds of success were always low; now they’re essentially zero. Oh really? As he wrote that... Microsoft was about to release Windows 2000 and Active Directory. Sun was investing (or soon would start) on things like ZFS and DTrace, which have had massive impact on the industry. Apple was recovering and soon would give us the iPhone and iOS. The cloud was a long way away, though, again, Sun had its "grid" just a few years later, and now the cloud has been a huge driver of innovation up and down the stack. GPUs were soon to be a big thing. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and many others, have invested huge amounts in research and innovation. Tensor processing and AI are all the rage in ways the AI researchers of the 80s could not have imagined. Linear types are being applied in real-world programming languages (Rust) to finally find a better way than garbage collection to alleviate manual memory management. Pike's pessimism was wrong. I'm sure he sees this now. I'm sure he's ecstatic at how things turned out. In his defense, 2000 capped a bleak decade in the software industry. As Keith M Wesolowski used to sign his emails: Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" Solaris Kernel Team "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" As an industry, we attacked in all directions. 2000 was the start of beautiful things.