4 ms·

Being a pet project of very senior engineer is not necessarily a bad thing. You know what? MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow and tens of other important

Being a pet project of very senior engineer is not necessarily a bad thing. You know what? MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow and tens of other important infrastructures were once Jeff Dean's toy projects. I don't think Google even can exist without them... Important thing is execution of the project, not its inception.

kortilla 4y ago
Something changed though. Those projects are ancient
- metadat 4y ago
  Jeff Dean is also a legend and not just a "senior engineer", more like google's version of John Carmack.
  - jpgvm 4y ago
    Phil Cutler is probably a better equivalent but yeah, definitely legend status either way.
    - daydream 4y ago
      You mean Dave Cutler?
      - jpgvm 4y ago
        Yes, brain fart. No idea how I subbed Dave for Phil but I guess that is what I get for typing while tired.
- summerlight 4y ago
  You want some recency? Search for Pathways, which is a backbone for PaLM.
mike_hearn 4y ago
Those projects all had a unique and very successful take on the problem they were solving, though. The problem with creating a new OS is getting people to write apps. It's not really justifiable if your new OS doesn't take a very different approach to how apps are written and yield much better results as a consequence. If you build a new OS and rely too heavily on emulated Linux apps, then what is your value proposition? You're effectively admitting defeat up front by saying there's no real reason to write a native app; that running Linux apps is good enough. With Fuschia this problem is especially apparent because it's not really obvious from reading the docs what its value prop really is, or how the UX of a native app differs from any other platform. Successful operating systems don't normally have this problem. You could argue that Linux was an exception, but there the value prop was being an open source PC UNIX and that price/compatibility point was enough. Other platforms though, like macOS or Android, needed to have a very clear offering up front to get developers to care, as well as a large library of first party apps.
- surajrmal 4y ago
  Your points don't jive with the success of ChromeOS. It doesn't have "native" apps, and runs Android and Linux applications via VMs. No one writing applications targets ChromeOS as far as I know. They target chrome, steam, or Android. People don't write applications for OS anymore, they write applications for platforms which can be abstracted and ported to different OS.
  - spencerchubb 4y ago
    The unique UX ChromeOS provides is that chromebooks are only $200. The comment above is just asking how Fuchsia will provide a differentiated UX
    - surajrmal 4y ago
      Fuchsia isn't necessarily targeting end users or application developers. Fuchsia exists to make products easier to build and maintain. Products are responsible for the app developer and end user experience.
dekhn 4y ago
mapreduce was a pain in the ass for anything but indexing. Very few if anything uses it any more (the MR engineers even had a CL to delete it entirely from google3). bigtable was hard to use, didn't have transactions, and was slow unless you put a ton of $$$ into it. Spanner... wasn't available for years to devs, until it had matured significantly. TF is just a piece of crap because everybody wanted to be associated with Jeff's projects and piled on their incompatible bits. Jeff came to me one day with a mapreduce he'd written and was very proud of. I spent a few months working on it and ultimately realized it was worthless. But he did make us patent it.

kortilla 4y ago

Something changed though. Those projects are ancient

metadat 4y ago
Jeff Dean is also a legend and not just a "senior engineer", more like google's version of John Carmack.
- jpgvm 4y ago
  Phil Cutler is probably a better equivalent but yeah, definitely legend status either way.
  - daydream 4y ago
    You mean Dave Cutler?
    - jpgvm 4y ago
      Yes, brain fart. No idea how I subbed Dave for Phil but I guess that is what I get for typing while tired.
summerlight 4y ago
You want some recency? Search for Pathways, which is a backbone for PaLM.

mike_hearn 4y ago

Those projects all had a unique and very successful take on the problem they were solving, though. The problem with creating a new OS is getting people to write apps. It's not really justifiable if your new OS doesn't take a very different approach to how apps are written and yield much better results as a consequence. If you build a new OS and rely too heavily on emulated Linux apps, then what is your value proposition? You're effectively admitting defeat up front by saying there's no real reason to write a native app; that running Linux apps is good enough. With Fuschia this problem is especially apparent because it's not really obvious from reading the docs what its value prop really is, or how the UX of a native app differs from any other platform. Successful operating systems don't normally have this problem. You could argue that Linux was an exception, but there the value prop was being an open source PC UNIX and that price/compatibility point was enough. Other platforms though, like macOS or Android, needed to have a very clear offering up front to get developers to care, as well as a large library of first party apps.

surajrmal 4y ago
Your points don't jive with the success of ChromeOS. It doesn't have "native" apps, and runs Android and Linux applications via VMs. No one writing applications targets ChromeOS as far as I know. They target chrome, steam, or Android. People don't write applications for OS anymore, they write applications for platforms which can be abstracted and ported to different OS.
- spencerchubb 4y ago
  The unique UX ChromeOS provides is that chromebooks are only $200. The comment above is just asking how Fuchsia will provide a differentiated UX
  - surajrmal 4y ago
    Fuchsia isn't necessarily targeting end users or application developers. Fuchsia exists to make products easier to build and maintain. Products are responsible for the app developer and end user experience.

dekhn 4y ago

mapreduce was a pain in the ass for anything but indexing. Very few if anything uses it any more (the MR engineers even had a CL to delete it entirely from google3). bigtable was hard to use, didn't have transactions, and was slow unless you put a ton of $$$ into it. Spanner... wasn't available for years to devs, until it had matured significantly. TF is just a piece of crap because everybody wanted to be associated with Jeff's projects and piled on their incompatible bits. Jeff came to me one day with a mapreduce he'd written and was very proud of. I spent a few months working on it and ultimately realized it was worthless. But he did make us patent it.