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In 1991 there was a very distinct job called system administrator and the really high skilled ones wrote all sorts of system administration tools in awk, Perl,
by kator 6y ago
In 1991 there was a very distinct job called system administrator and the really high skilled ones wrote all sorts of system administration tools in awk, Perl, Shell, and sometimes in C. This to me was 'systems programming' for the administration, deployment, automation, and management of the 'systems'.
This was in contrast to "developers" who wrote application code in numerous languages COBOL, Pascal, Fortran, BASIC, etc. And they in general, did not manage the underlying system.
Over the years I think those lines have blurred and the roles are all smashed together sometimes called devops or other terms.
- Athas 6y agoYes, this is close to what I'd also prefer to be my definition. "Systems programming" is about writing the programs that users don't care about. This involves all kinds of infrastructure: certainly the kernel, but also various other bits of critical plumbing. But that doesn't fit the definition from that Usenix paper, as nroff was an important user-visible application program, even if it isn't much anymore. I think it is probably best to avoid using the term "systems programming" except when within a constrained community where the intended meaning is clear. Just look at how much confusion arose from the original announcement that Go was a systems programming language!