Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
Rob Pike was drinking the poison chalice well before the rest of us. He wasn&#x27;t wrong, here, back, in 2000. But damn. We&#x27;ve seen net zero systematic gain in computing across the entire industry in TWO FUCKING DECADES. Not a single iota of gains or win. Not a single systems software change has made it into the world. Everything is dead dead dead dead. Applications claim more and more and more, networks portals &amp; endless walled gardens claiming bigger and bigger chunks of mindshare. General computing has won not a single drop. It&#x27;s not because Pike was right: it&#x27;s because we let everything except Systems Software grow, because we failed utterly to even try to deliver &quot;wide&quot; value in computing. Systems research was already giving the fuck up, it&#x27;s funding was disappearing, &amp; Pike was merely pounding another cynical nail in the coffin of trying for better at a time when we were desperately in need. Few concerted efforts were materializing then, &amp; less &amp; less have materialized along the way.<p>Perhaps the biggest modern counter-example we might point to is Rust. But in many ways, I feel like Rust justifies many of Pike&#x27;s complaints:<p>&gt; <i>If systems research was relevant, we’d see new operating systems and new languages making inroads into the industry, the way we did in the ’70s and ’80s.</i><p>Now, I don&#x27;t think this expectation is fair. But I do think that Rust is primarily different for developers. It hasn&#x27;t really given rise to anything new, from what I can see. There&#x27;s no new potentials here, no new possibilities embued by Rust: it&#x27;s simply the same, but less, deliberately less, deliberately more choosy: it&#x27;s a deliberate subset. It will never help us explore further, make better user systems. Only ones which fuck up slightly less. Generally I think the paranoia fear &amp; sadness over software camp already had too strong a hold.<p>This paper hurt like fuck when I originally read it. It&#x27;s still not wrong. But it&#x27;s unnecessary overkill, to a world that was already suffering, and which, I believed then &amp; believe now, must ultimately rise like a phoenix &amp; rediscover itself, re-find purpose, &amp; make itself real. Computing has gotten only ever more fake &amp; bullshit since this decrial, and 99% of what Pike pissed on is exactly what is necessary for computing to regain even the most faint sense of vitality &amp; aliveness. We&#x27;ve been in the deadzone for decades now, decades since this was written. Pike was not wrong when he warned about what a doledrums we were in,  but it&#x27;s not Systems Software that&#x27;s at fault. It&#x27;s failure to make real, failure to believe, failure to live in a better world, failure to build with as opposed to build alternatives-to that had been dooming us. This call for anti-vision is 100% the black miasma we have had to live inside of for the past two decades, has perfectly described the nihilism that hope has been trapped inside of. It&#x27;s fucking time to open the god damned pandora&#x27;s box again, and let hope try to make it&#x27;s way out.<p>Rather than measure by how many operating systems are being created, I&#x27;d prefer measuring by more forward thinking metrics. The results are still not good. But measuring how many cross-website information systems emerge. Counting systems like Tim Berners-Lee&#x27;s Solid or ActivityPub: they are where the puck is. The truth is, operating systems are irrelevant, because they have never succeeded beyond a single computer, and no one cares about a single computer anymore. It&#x27;s no longer where the puck is. Systems research needs to be connected, communicative today. It needs to be online, and preferrably if at all possible offline too. The new frontiers of systems research are tech like CRDTs and Git. They&#x27;re tools like Web Annotations that give us read-annotate-write capabilities to the general computing medium&#x2F;fabric of the day, like the web. To a lesser degree it&#x27;s also systems like FreeDesktop &amp; DBus, which help applications &amp; daemons expose themselves to user-scripting, it&#x27;s tools like systemd which are intensely automateable &amp; advanced new master-control-programs for the OS. I think we&#x27;re still missing layers to really surface the malleability of this digital matter to the user, we&#x27;re still not making a real difference, &amp; we need to some day emerge from behind the digital curtain &amp; become real to the world, to make systems research relevant. But systems research is happening, it is important, it has changed everything. Just... alas... very very very little for the user. That still needs to be changed. But new OSes will probably not make the difference. We already have great mediums, great systems; the frontier merely needs research to be bridged back into the mundane everyday experience of the &quot;user&#x27;.