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I definitely agree with you, and apologies if that didn't come through in the piece! (Perhaps the rare case where I undershot on the metaphors?) One thing I di

I definitely agree with you, and apologies if that didn't come through in the piece! (Perhaps the rare case where I undershot on the metaphors?) One thing I didn't mention but certainly believe: academics were attracted to USENIX ATC because of its attendance count (especially at the height of the Dot Com boom when it had nearly 2,000 attendees!) -- but no one really took apart who was attending or what they were looking for. So the conference became more academic because of the attendee count -- but that it became more academic also drove the attendee count down. (I heard from a lot of practitioners who attended that they struggled to find sessions that were relevant to their work in even the broadest sense.) I know I link to it in the piece, but I think Rik Farrow's piece[0] really got right to the heart of all of this. [0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_fall16_01_farrow.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_fal...

khuey 1y ago
I didn't mean to imply that I disagreed with anything other than that specific point (which perhaps is more nostalgia for the halcyon days of in-person conferences than anything else). I do think that you correctly identified a major source of the problem back in 2004 as economic factors. I was at Mozilla when Rust was built (though not directly involved) and the sum of Mozilla's investment into Rust over the years easily broke into the 8 digits. Google's investment in Go I'm sure is an order of magnitude or two more than that. This is simply beyond the capacity of any academic institution or grant process. The only academic efforts that get to this level require Acts of Congress (e.g. LIGO, the Human Genome Project, the James Webb Space Telescope, etc). And anyone who can afford to drop $10M+ into development can find channels for distributing and publicizing their work that don't go through program committees. Open source is definitely a big part of that but I don't think that's the whole story. I'd certainly count CUDA as a major advance in systems software since 2004, for instance.

khuey 1y ago

I didn't mean to imply that I disagreed with anything other than that specific point (which perhaps is more nostalgia for the halcyon days of in-person conferences than anything else). I do think that you correctly identified a major source of the problem back in 2004 as economic factors. I was at Mozilla when Rust was built (though not directly involved) and the sum of Mozilla's investment into Rust over the years easily broke into the 8 digits. Google's investment in Go I'm sure is an order of magnitude or two more than that. This is simply beyond the capacity of any academic institution or grant process. The only academic efforts that get to this level require Acts of Congress (e.g. LIGO, the Human Genome Project, the James Webb Space Telescope, etc). And anyone who can afford to drop $10M+ into development can find channels for distributing and publicizing their work that don't go through program committees. Open source is definitely a big part of that but I don't think that's the whole story. I'd certainly count CUDA as a major advance in systems software since 2004, for instance.