Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

herpolhode.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 73 posts

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#21

Post by Ericson2314 »

mirker wrote: post #14
Ericson2314 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systems research has become like orthodox economics, doing various marginal empirics but missing the bigger more qualative macro picture. Maybe the megacorp that is going to hire you wants to see some benchmarks improved, but frankly, that's not what the world needs, or even what would best benefit the megacorp? Economics at least has its uncooth grandfather in Political Economy. Computer systems needs to discover it…

I agree with you, but at the same time, I think it’s easy to dismiss this whole line of thought as quacky. It’s very hard to argue with tables and plots. Economics has a lot of mathematical work for similar “hard science” reasons.

It's not how academia is structured, but backing up criticism with a protoype of the alternative IMO completely solves the credability problem.

From the vantage of the social sciences, where one can only dream of running prototype towns and cities, this is a gift and systems researchers should consider themselves lucky.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#22

Post by shric »

musicale wrote: post #11

Hmm, doesn't Rob Pike now work at Google, which has developed the Chrome browser, which in addition to being a successor to Netscape (mentioned in the article) is basically a complete OS and runtime environment, as well as the literal ChromeOS, Android, Fuchsia, and Kubernetes, as well as Dart, and Go (and also adopted Kotlin for Android?) Not to mention software systems for special-purpose hardware like tensorflow,…

He did, but he retired a few months ago.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#23

Post by linguae »

tzs wrote: post #17

> There has been much talk about component architectures but only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts. Wouldn't Microsoft's COM be another success in that area? It was several years old and in widespread use in Windows at the time the article was written.

Perhaps Rob Pike had OpenDoc in mind, which was cancelled by Apple in 1997:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E -- a roughly three-minute promotional video describing OpenDoc

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FSFvEIpm5o -- a 54-minute video with much more information about OpenDoc

Also, while COM is used by Windows developers, I argue the vast majority of non-developer Windows users are unaware of COM. The most they've experienced end-user component-based software is OLE (the technology that enables embedded documents; e.g., having an Excel spreadsheet inside a Word document) and ActiveX (before it became infamous for its security vulnerabilities). However, even though COM (and alternatively the .NET Common Language Infrastructure) provides the infrastructure to create a marketplace of components that can be mixed-and-matched just like how Unix tools can be strung together, the Windows ecosystem is still dominated by large applications, though I believe this has much more to do with the economics of the software industry (companies want to sell integrated solutions, not components) rather than any technological limitations; I believe this is the same factor that caused Apple to cancel OpenDoc; my opinion is that Apple in 1997 needed the support of large software vendors like Adobe and Microsoft in order for the Mac to stay alive, and OpenDoc's promise of fostering a marketplace of components is disruptive to vendors of large software applications, particularly the same vendors Apple wanted to continue making Mac applications.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#24

Post by pjmlp »

linguae wrote: post #23
tzs wrote: post #17

> There has been much talk about component architectures but only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts. Wouldn't Microsoft's COM be another success in that area? It was several years old and in widespread use in Windows at the time the article was written.

Perhaps Rob Pike had OpenDoc in mind, which was cancelled by Apple in 1997: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E -- a roughly three-minute promotional video describing OpenDoc - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FSFvEIpm5o -- a 54-minute video with much more information about OpenDoc Also, while COM is used by Windows developers, I argue the vast majority of non-develop…

You have companies like Telerik, ComponentONE, DevExpress for the components.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#25

Post by pjmlp »

rektide wrote: post #6
smitty1e wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well: * the cloud re-invented timesharing * big data gave us distributed databases * crypto had a tryst with distributed databases at the Timeshare Suites and begat blockchain I'm unsure whether I'm refuting of agreeing with The Famous Article.

Notably just about zero of what you've mentioned is apparent or directly empowering to users. They have better services at their disposal as a result of these systems developments, but almost no users have more personal.xontrol, are better aware & more capable of relliantly doing computing than they had been. In my view we've only made users dependent & less capable, we've given up all ideas of systems to the cult of…

Systems research is about technology not about empowering so and so.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#26

Post by old-gregg »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #12

I think that i understand the argument, but things changed with the advent of microservices. Suddenly everything turned into a distributed system, and it is hard to cope without some understanding of the subject matter. This lecture series by Martin Kleppman has helped me quite a bit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEAMfLPZZhE&list=PLeKd45zvjc... Also see his book 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications', which…

> but things changed with the advent of microservices.

Microservices is just a marketing buzzword invented by container orchestration start-ups. Partitioning of large applications across multiple inter-connected processes has been around for decades. Your computer is packed with microservices.

On Linux, type `watch date` and enjoy two microservices running and interacting. On Windows, observe a dozen of svchost.exe processes in the Task Manager.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#27

Post by wombatmobile »

> The web happened in the early 1990s and it surprised the computer science community as much as the commercial one. It then came to dominate much of the discussion, but not to much effect. . .

> Research has contributed little, despite a huge flow of papers on caches, proxies, server architectures, etc

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#28

Post by [deleted] »

klysm wrote: post #19
henning wrote: post #18

It takes a person like this to design a language like Go, whose fundamental philosophy is that people cannot and do not want to learn anything new, ever. It takes that kind of cynicism to also view hardware with disdain and horror.

I’m glad I’m not the only person who views the design of go through that lens. It seems to me to be firmly rooted in the belief that developers are better off with weaker tools.

[deleted]

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#29

Post by caffeine »

musicale wrote: post #11

Hmm, doesn't Rob Pike now work at Google, which has developed the Chrome browser, which in addition to being a successor to Netscape (mentioned in the article) is basically a complete OS and runtime environment, as well as the literal ChromeOS, Android, Fuchsia, and Kubernetes, as well as Dart, and Go (and also adopted Kotlin for Android?) Not to mention software systems for special-purpose hardware like tensorflow,…

You are exactly correct, and that’s his only (highly belaboured) point - none of those exciting things are coming out of academia, it’s all commercial labs.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#30

Post by sytelus »

Systems software research is alive and well. Making new single machine kernels is just no longer priority. Community shifted to distributed system (essentially viewing thousands of computers as one fault-tolerant OS). A lot of things came indeed from academia. The next shift currently underway is in distributed machine learning (how can you build, train and serve trillion trillion parameter models - call it a distributed machine learning OS). A lot of things again is coming from academia. The field has grown up and old folks are lost in nostalgia of not seeing new kernels as they used to.
Post reply on HN