Rob Pike wrote this because of a disappointment in the decline of system software research, specifically in operating systems. In the 90s there was a lot of gre

Rob Pike wrote this because of a disappointment in the decline of system software research, specifically in operating systems. In the 90s there was a lot of great work but the momentum, he is stating, was on the decline. When you read what he writes (at least from my perspective), it's not a sincere call to stop doing systems research, but that everyone else thinks it's less relevant so what the hell is the point of pursuing it anymore? One supporting point to this is, the conferences like ACM SOSP [1] and USENIX OSDI [2] have sessions now that have nothing to do with operating systems or systems software. For example, bug finding, "big data", web apps, RDMA (high-performance networking), machine learning, security (this does have relation to systems, but the research presented often is tangential, e.g., with GPGPUs, or a secure chat system), and graph processing (??). [1] http://sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2015/current/index.html http://sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2015/current/index.html [2] https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi18/technical-sessions https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi18/technical-sessions