Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
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Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
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Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#2The last 19 years of systems software research have not refuted Rob's thesis. Industry has made incremental progress, academia has written papers but not built much that people want to use. Despite massive increases in graphics processing power, desktop UIs are still about the same as in 2000, just with more shininess.
And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#3The last 19 years of systems software research have not refuted Rob's thesis. Industry has made incremental progress, academia has written papers but not built much that people want to use. Despite massive increases in graphics processing power, desktop UIs are still about the same as in 2000, just with more shininess. And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security.
> And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security.
This is an astonishing claim: what makes you think it hasn't gotten better? It's gotten a LOT better since 2000.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#4The last 19 years of systems software research have not refuted Rob's thesis. Industry has made incremental progress, academia has written papers but not built much that people want to use. Despite massive increases in graphics processing power, desktop UIs are still about the same as in 2000, just with more shininess. And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security.
There's a lot of churn in tech - people jump to new stacks for job prospects, instead of solving hard problems in existing frameworks. This is part of the reason why tech keeps on reinventing the wheel instead of providing improved productivity perceived from the business (customers' business needs) perspective.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#5The last 19 years of systems software research have not refuted Rob's thesis. Industry has made incremental progress, academia has written papers but not built much that people want to use. Despite massive increases in graphics processing power, desktop UIs are still about the same as in 2000, just with more shininess. And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security.
> And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security. This is an astonishing claim: what makes you think it hasn't gotten better? It's gotten a LOT better since 2000.
We live in a world where the ratio of computers to people is greater then one and still don't have great isolation between peograms.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#6I would argue that systems research has been incredibly relevant. First consider programming languages. Even though languages such as Java, C++, C# are all widely used, they are much different languages than they were in the early 2000’s. You can see the influences of academic research especially from the functional languages (monads) on these languages. Also, Rust is an exciting new language that is enabled by the systems software research of the past.
If you look at networking, recently, there has been the move towards new protocols (quic) that was the result of systems research looking at the deficiencies of tcp. Another area is consensus algorithms. We now have large scale real life deployments of consensus algorithms, for example Spanner and etcd.
The late 90’s and early 2000’s were a weird time where the hardware was improving so fast and taking software along for a free ride that a lot of software was good enough. Now, as we bump more into the end of Moore’s Law, we will be seeing more research and real life usage of multicore and heterogenous computing and libraries and languages and operating systems that try to make that easier.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#7Virtualization. Capabilities. Kernel-bypass networking. Static code analysis. Verified-pointer microarchitectures. Coverage-guided fuzzing.
Systems software research has come a long way since 2000.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#8The last 19 years of systems software research have not refuted Rob's thesis. Industry has made incremental progress, academia has written papers but not built much that people want to use. Despite massive increases in graphics processing power, desktop UIs are still about the same as in 2000, just with more shininess. And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security.
> And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security. This is an astonishing claim: what makes you think it hasn't gotten better? It's gotten a LOT better since 2000.
I’d love to go back to Windows 2000 (and Google circa 2000). The software industry (at least in the desktop side) peaked two decades ago, then spent most of the last decade or so badly reinventing everything on the web.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security. This is an astonishing claim: what makes you think it hasn't gotten better? It's gotten a LOT better since 2000.
We live in a world where the ratio of computers to people is greater then one and still don't have great isolation between peograms.
We have pretty great isolation between programs on iOS and Android.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#10The last 19 years of systems software research have not refuted Rob's thesis. Industry has made incremental progress, academia has written papers but not built much that people want to use. Despite massive increases in graphics processing power, desktop UIs are still about the same as in 2000, just with more shininess. And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security.
> And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security.
In 2000, people mostly still used Windows 9x. A single-user system with no sandboxing and no built-in firewall.