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I am genuinely curious how anything technically superior ever gets a chance in this concocted world of yours. Clearly, you prize "less friction among humans" ab

by dxbydt 14y ago

I am genuinely curious how anything technically superior ever gets a chance in this concocted world of yours. Clearly, you prize "less friction among humans" above all else. So given a choice between a clearly flawed technical solution ( say building an operating system in PHP) and alienating other humans ( specifically, an office full of PHP experts ), we should build the OS in PHP because that leads to less friction among humans...yeah ? Let me know how that goes... Back on point, In grad school, we read the Tenenbaum-Torvalds debates in OS class to get an idea of the current state of research. Tenenbaum's point, among other things, was that microkernels were an unsolved problem. Granted they pushed the problem space into communication, and you had to contend with latencies....but that was the whole prize, to solve this brand new problem space. Whereas big bad monolithic OSes were a solved problem. We know they could be done. As far as a CS researcher was concerned, there was no meat in that space...it was mostly implementation detail and optimizing. Whereas microkernels, despite being a cleaner, more elegant approach to OS design, clearly had tons of issues to be solved, and whoever took a stab at them would push the state of the art forward. That is the point => to find a superior technical solution, not minimizing friction among humans.

maratd 14y ago
> I am genuinely curious how anything technically superior ever gets a chance in this concocted world of yours. If it actually works, sure. Unfortunately, due to uncontrolled hipsterism most technologies touted as "technically superior" don't actually work. It's very easy to throw up a demo or a benchmark. It's very easy to write a paper that shows how amazing what you wrote happens to be. Integrating something into a production stack that doesn't cause more problems than it solves is really hard. And it very rarely happens. So yeah, while you're still at the office at midnight trying to track down what exactly in your stack exploded ... I'm sleeping ... because I decided to go with something that's proven, rather than the latest and greatest. > we should build the OS in PHP Bonus points for trolling.
wissler 14y ago
I'm glad to see someone getting the point, which is that we as scientists strive for simplified, unified explanations and systems, and that's a good thing. Linux is nice and practical, but try working with it as a systems programmer sometime. It's full of hacks and arbitrary complexity and all manner of nonsense that persists year after year.
- shasta 14y ago
  I hate all the existing OSes for this reason. Unfortunately, it's easier to crowd source a big pile of dung (sure you can help - just pick up a shovel!) than it is to build something elegant.
  - adestefan 14y ago
    The problem is that even the most beautiful and simple solutions end up turning into a big pile of dung to actually be useful in the real world. You get to the 80% point and then all of a sudden you realize that to do the next thing you need one little hack here. Now you get to 85% and you realize you need one more little hack, then at 88% you need another little hack to make it speedy, ...
    - wissler 14y ago
      The problem is that even the most beautiful and simple solutions end up turning into a big pile of dung Until they don't. You don't know what who is going to come up with next.
      - adestefan 14y ago
        Way to hack off the end of my sentence which is the most important part.
  - caf 14y ago
    The reason for this appears to be that elegant solutions do not survive contact with the real world. When someone comes to you with an inelegant hack that makes her database benchmark run 20% faster, you can either accept it and sacrifice some of your elegance, or your can reject it on elegance grounds and sacrifice some of your relevance.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      Interestingly, Postgresql refuses to support query plan hints, a very popular hack on the Oracle world, because they insist if you can write a better query plan than the planner, you should teach the planner how to do it instead. Elegance in the long term over pragmatism of the moment.
fmoralesc 14y ago
> Back on point, In grad school, we read the Tenenbaum- Torvalds debates in OS class to get an idea of the current state of research. > ... tons of issues to be solved, and whoever took a stab at them would push the state of the art forward. That is the point => to find a superior technical solution, not minimizing friction among humans. You are talking from the perspective of computer science research, whereas he is talking about software engineering in practice. There's a difference there, imho.
smegel 14y ago
> microkernels were an unsolved problem Wrong. The "problem" is designing an operating system that is reliable, fast, fault-tolerant, user-friendly, maintainable, etc etc. "microkernels" are just one example of a proposed solution to solve this problem - a design that despite the fanatical support of rabid academics like Tenenbaum has been shown to be a poor choice due to the complexity involved in implementation.

by dxbydt 14y ago

maratd 14y ago

> I am genuinely curious how anything technically superior ever gets a chance in this concocted world of yours. If it actually works, sure. Unfortunately, due to uncontrolled hipsterism most technologies touted as "technically superior" don't actually work. It's very easy to throw up a demo or a benchmark. It's very easy to write a paper that shows how amazing what you wrote happens to be. Integrating something into a production stack that doesn't cause more problems than it solves is really hard. And it very rarely happens. So yeah, while you're still at the office at midnight trying to track down what exactly in your stack exploded ... I'm sleeping ... because I decided to go with something that's proven, rather than the latest and greatest. > we should build the OS in PHP Bonus points for trolling.

wissler 14y ago

I'm glad to see someone getting the point, which is that we as scientists strive for simplified, unified explanations and systems, and that's a good thing. Linux is nice and practical, but try working with it as a systems programmer sometime. It's full of hacks and arbitrary complexity and all manner of nonsense that persists year after year.

shasta 14y ago
I hate all the existing OSes for this reason. Unfortunately, it's easier to crowd source a big pile of dung (sure you can help - just pick up a shovel!) than it is to build something elegant.
- adestefan 14y ago
  The problem is that even the most beautiful and simple solutions end up turning into a big pile of dung to actually be useful in the real world. You get to the 80% point and then all of a sudden you realize that to do the next thing you need one little hack here. Now you get to 85% and you realize you need one more little hack, then at 88% you need another little hack to make it speedy, ...
  - wissler 14y ago
    The problem is that even the most beautiful and simple solutions end up turning into a big pile of dung Until they don't. You don't know what who is going to come up with next.
    - adestefan 14y ago
      Way to hack off the end of my sentence which is the most important part.
- caf 14y ago
  The reason for this appears to be that elegant solutions do not survive contact with the real world. When someone comes to you with an inelegant hack that makes her database benchmark run 20% faster, you can either accept it and sacrifice some of your elegance, or your can reject it on elegance grounds and sacrifice some of your relevance.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Interestingly, Postgresql refuses to support query plan hints, a very popular hack on the Oracle world, because they insist if you can write a better query plan than the planner, you should teach the planner how to do it instead. Elegance in the long term over pragmatism of the moment.

fmoralesc 14y ago

> Back on point, In grad school, we read the Tenenbaum- Torvalds debates in OS class to get an idea of the current state of research. > ... tons of issues to be solved, and whoever took a stab at them would push the state of the art forward. That is the point => to find a superior technical solution, not minimizing friction among humans. You are talking from the perspective of computer science research, whereas he is talking about software engineering in practice. There's a difference there, imho.

smegel 14y ago

> microkernels were an unsolved problem Wrong. The "problem" is designing an operating system that is reliable, fast, fault-tolerant, user-friendly, maintainable, etc etc. "microkernels" are just one example of a proposed solution to solve this problem - a design that despite the fanatical support of rabid academics like Tenenbaum has been shown to be a poor choice due to the complexity involved in implementation.