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Rob Pike’s talk “Systems Software Research is Irrelevant” (given 22 years ago!) provides some nice color here - we kinda just settled on “good enough” in a lot

Rob Pike’s talk “Systems Software Research is Irrelevant” (given 22 years ago!) provides some nice color here - we kinda just settled on “good enough” in a lot of ways: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.html http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.html

throwawaylinux 4y ago
And in that time, the state of the art in systems software has advanced so dramatically as to be almost unrecognizable to someone that short length of time ago. In programming interfaces, bringing the hypervisor into the OS, concurrency and scalability and performance techniques, etc. I think the subject is right: systems software "research" is irrelevant. Because academia could no longer keep up.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  None of those things is novel in academia though...
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
- physPop 4y ago
  "All these things academics invented that are now commonplace..."
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    Academics didn't invent them. IBM and Bell Labs, maybe.
    - kjs3 4y ago
      You may be surprised that academics exist in places that don't have 'university' or 'college' in their name. From experience, folks at places like IBM TJ Watson Research Center, AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center or DEC Western Research Lab considered themselves academics, had academic job descriptions and did the work of academics.
      - throwawaylinux 4y ago
        I'm not even slightly surprised that people who were worth their salt and could actually create fled universities and went to private industry and did great things there, while traditional academia languished and stagnated. It's not the people who are necessarily unsuited, it's the institutions.
eikenberry 4y ago
Saying we settled on something social shows a misunderstanding of the humanities. For example.. we didn't pick Linux to win out of all the OS's available at the time or in the near future. It just became the winner through a extremely complex series of events to which diminutive references don't do justice.
ShredKazoo 4y ago
His point about how software on a high-end workstation barely changed over the course of 10 years is interesting. I feel like if you asked someone many decades ago whether hardware vs software would change more, they would likely say "software of course! it's easy to rewrite." It's interesting to read a manpage on a slick, modern-seeming system like macOS and notice a date at the bottom which is literally last century. I guess the key thing is the birth of self-sustaining "software ecosystems": even if the ecosystem is flawed, the benefit of being part of the ecosystem is really high, and choosing to be part of the ecosystem means adding to it, which makes the benefit of being part of it even greater. Unix is self-sustaining despite any flaws in the same way qwerty and the English language are self-sustaining despite any flaws. Unix is like a protocol for software projects to coordinate with each other and with human beings. Ironically, if it wasn't for rapid development of hardware and broad penetration of computers throughout society, we might still be in a phase of rapid systems evolution, since the "ecosystems" wouldn't be as well-developed. Popularity increase -> lock-in.

throwawaylinux 4y ago

And in that time, the state of the art in systems software has advanced so dramatically as to be almost unrecognizable to someone that short length of time ago. In programming interfaces, bringing the hypervisor into the OS, concurrency and scalability and performance techniques, etc. I think the subject is right: systems software "research" is irrelevant. Because academia could no longer keep up.

aidenn0 4y ago
None of those things is novel in academia though...
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
physPop 4y ago
"All these things academics invented that are now commonplace..."
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Academics didn't invent them. IBM and Bell Labs, maybe.
  - kjs3 4y ago
    You may be surprised that academics exist in places that don't have 'university' or 'college' in their name. From experience, folks at places like IBM TJ Watson Research Center, AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center or DEC Western Research Lab considered themselves academics, had academic job descriptions and did the work of academics.
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      I'm not even slightly surprised that people who were worth their salt and could actually create fled universities and went to private industry and did great things there, while traditional academia languished and stagnated. It's not the people who are necessarily unsuited, it's the institutions.

eikenberry 4y ago

Saying we settled on something social shows a misunderstanding of the humanities. For example.. we didn't pick Linux to win out of all the OS's available at the time or in the near future. It just became the winner through a extremely complex series of events to which diminutive references don't do justice.

ShredKazoo 4y ago

His point about how software on a high-end workstation barely changed over the course of 10 years is interesting. I feel like if you asked someone many decades ago whether hardware vs software would change more, they would likely say "software of course! it's easy to rewrite." It's interesting to read a manpage on a slick, modern-seeming system like macOS and notice a date at the bottom which is literally last century. I guess the key thing is the birth of self-sustaining "software ecosystems": even if the ecosystem is flawed, the benefit of being part of the ecosystem is really high, and choosing to be part of the ecosystem means adding to it, which makes the benefit of being part of it even greater. Unix is self-sustaining despite any flaws in the same way qwerty and the English language are self-sustaining despite any flaws. Unix is like a protocol for software projects to coordinate with each other and with human beings. Ironically, if it wasn't for rapid development of hardware and broad penetration of computers throughout society, we might still be in a phase of rapid systems evolution, since the "ecosystems" wouldn't be as well-developed. Popularity increase -> lock-in.