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Systems research has become like orthodox economics, doing various marginal empirics but missing the bigger more qualative macro picture. Maybe the megacorp th
by Ericson2314 5y ago
Systems research has become like orthodox economics, doing various marginal empirics but missing the bigger more qualative macro picture.
Maybe the megacorp that is going to hire you wants to see some benchmarks improved, but frankly, that's not what the world needs, or even what would best benefit the megacorp?
Economics at least has its uncooth grandfather in Political Economy. Computer systems needs to discover it's equivalent, something that is not afraid to go full qualitative and tackle the daemon of accidental complexity head on. There is still great work to be done auditing "supply chains" in dependencies and bootstraps, characterizing bad abstractions and proposing better ones, etc. etc. Per what I wrote the top level comment about capabilities, I think this work can be "practical" in offering realistic incremental improvements and not just more baleful essays like this one, too.
- mirker 5y agoI agree with you, but at the same time, I think it’s easy to dismiss this whole line of thought as quacky. It’s very hard to argue with tables and plots. Economics has a lot of mathematical work for similar “hard science” reasons.
- Ericson2314 5y agoIt's not how academia is structured, but backing up criticism with a protoype of the alternative IMO completely solves the credability problem. From the vantage of the social sciences, where one can only dream of running prototype towns and cities, this is a gift and systems researchers should consider themselves lucky.
- mirker 5y agoWhat if there are many alternatives? Each implementation would be a challenge to optimize fairly. You’d be forced to have some open competition to make it convincing.
- Ericson2314 5y agoI'm confused what you mean? The prototypes need not be performant, they just must be correct and not outrageously naive to demonstrate the better abstractions/layering is working. The questions are: is the code beautiful and dose it work?
- mirker 5y agoAh well that requires a lot of manual inspection. Usually there isn’t enough attention span to do that in practice.
- andrewjl 5y ago> characterizing bad abstractions and proposing better ones Do you know of anything published that tackles this?
- Ericson2314 5y agoNot really. Closest I know is the PL papers, but even there I would say there is too much new stuff without the criticism. But that is more the general development bottleneck / research traffic jam. With few of those able to make to to the "real world", there is less experience to ground such criticism in.