Systems Software Research is Irrelevant

tags

Computer Science

Notes

Hardware has changed dramatically; software is stagnant.

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thriving software industry that largely ignores research, and a research community that writes papers rather than software.

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The excitement generated by a clone of a decades-old operating system demonstrates the void that the systems software research community has failed to fill.

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The art is gone. But art is not science, and that’s part of the point. Systems research cannot be just science; there must be engineering, design, and art.

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The web came from physicists and prospered in industry.

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3270s have been replaced by web browsers.

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90-95% of the work in Plan 9 was directly or indirectly to honor externally imposed standards.

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commercial companies that ‘own’ standards, e.g. Microsoft, Cisco, deliberately make standards hard to comply with, to frustrate competition. Academia is a casualty.

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research is directed at very fast ‘return on investment’.

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You can’t make money on software, only hardware, so design a niche gimmick, not a Big New Idea. Programmability - once the Big Idea in computing - has fallen by the wayside.

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Go back to thinking about and building systems. Narrowness is irrelevant; breadth is relevant: it’s the essence of system.

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Only one GUI has ever been seriously tried, and its best ideas date from the 1970s.

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I doubt that a brilliant systems project would even be funded, and if funded, wouldn’t find the bodies to do the work.

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separate research from market capitalization.

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