Top all-time · #1375
Rob Pike
Personal blog · herpolhode.comprogrammingsystemsscience
Rob Pike writes Herpolhode, a personal blog at herpolhode.com about programming, systems and science. Since 2008, 54 different Hacker News readers have linked it 59 times, most often “Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]33 people · 36 mentions · first linked 2010-01-31
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2008-08-14
- Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-09-05
- An Introduction to Quantum Computation and Quantum Communication (2000) [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-07-11
What Hacker News says?
I feel this document really captures the feeling that OS researchers had at the turn of the century: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf On one hand you had Windows NT taking over commercial space, on the other you had the Linux juggernaut gathering speed. There was not much left for the niche players. Glad to see Minix survives still.
Comment linking /rob/utah2000.pdf
on “Minix 3.3.0”Submitted Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf] as a story · 128 points
HN discussionThat's the one, though I prefer this format: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf I don't agree strictly with everything he says. It is a polemic rather than a careful argument. But still, he has a point and the data about OS research is strong (even beyond his data).
Comment linking /rob/utah2000.pdf
on “A Generation Lost in the Bazaar ”Submitted An Introduction to Quantum Computation and Quantum Communication (2000) [pdf] as a story · 101 points
HN discussion> New operating systems today tend to be just ways of reimplementing Unix. If they have a novel architecture -- and some do -- the first thing to build is the Unix emulation layer. > How can operating systems research be relevant when the resulting operating systems are all indistinguishable? > There was a claim in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Unix had killed operating systems research because no one would tr…
Comment linking /rob/utah2000.pdf
on “Show HN: Universal Pause Button”Submitted Rob Pike (2001): Presentation looking back on 1 billion seconds of Unix. [pdf] as a story · 57 points
HN discussion> The success of browsers is an indictment of the entire field of operating systems research. Rob Pike wrote in the year 2000 that systems software research was irrelevant ( http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf ), and it seems to me that not much has changed since then. How many ideas from the last few decades of operating systems research have actually been put into practice? The real problem is more fundamental:…
Comment linking /rob/utah2000.pdf
on “Clang runs in the browser and compiles C++ to WebAssembly”Submitted An Introduction to Quantum Computation and Communication by Rob Pike [PDF] as a story · 28 points
HN discussionSounds like you like myself have taken Rob Pike’s take from long ago to heart http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf While plenty of things have happened since that paper, I have this sinking feeling that he was right and we just stopped trying to really expand and explore what’s possible. But it may be more a matter of the state of academia than about the domain itself. It’s not like people were getting a bunch…
Comment linking /rob/utah2000.pdf
on “Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award”Submitted The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy as a story · 28 points
HN discussion> The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed. Nobody is denying it, indeed we see many related development. However, it's not only about "the lost future that never comes", I think it's also due to the people being increasingly alienated about the current state of computing. Primarily, it's about the lost mentality of the future. Cyberpunk promised a future where computing is the disruptive t…
Comment linking /rob/utah2000.pdf
on “SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]”Submitted The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy [pdf] (2001) as a story · 19 points
HN discussion> This reminds me of Rob Pike's article "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant," written about 15 years ago. 25 years ago: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf (Time flies.)
Comment linking /rob/utah2000.pdf
on “Distributed systems programming has stalled”Submitted Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf] as a story · 14 points
HN discussionRob Pike already has: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf
Comment linking /rob/utah2000.pdf
on “Linus vs C++, again”Submitted Rob Pike - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy [pdf] (2001) as a story · 13 points
HN discussionI read that more in a context of "teaching oneself". However, I think he's at google atm: http://herpolhode.com/rob/
Comment linking /rob/
on “Robpike/Lisp: Toy Lisp 1.5 interpreter in Go”Submitted Rio: Design of a Concurrent Window System (2000) [pdf] as a story · 13 points
HN discussionThis reminds of Robert Pike's "Systems Research is Irrelevant" speech [1]. Now, 20 years after his speech, we are still stuck with the same notions (such as everything being a string). It's not that there are not plenty of alternatives around, however, expectations are so high that it's almost impossible to make a new computer system economically viable. On the other hand, the hacker and maker scene is very active,…
Comment linking /rob/utah2000.pdf
on “Little Things That Made Amiga Great”Submitted Rob Pike on Systems Software Research (2000) as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSimilarity isn't a clear-cut yes/no question, but the NT kernel is so similar to UNIX that it was able to adopt a second syscall ABI compatible with Linux. Present operating systems are basically a monoculture in terms of high-level design decisions; Rob Pike complained eloquently about this in 2000, and outside of possibly unikernel development (which still usually has a libc/unix-like layer implementing at least a…
Comment linking /rob/utah2000.pdf
on “Why Rust for Low-Level Linux Programming?”Submitted Systems Software Research is Irrelevant - Rob Pike as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSome of the original Bell Labs Unix people have a very austere view of the Unix philosophy. In their view, it all started to go wrong -- Unix began to depart from the founding principles -- as early as 1978. In their view, Berkeley Unix does not follow their Unix philosophy -- they don't like network sockets, for example, whose design was mostly imported from some earlier non-Unix system (maybe Tenex?). Some of this…
Comment linking /rob/ugly.pdf
on “Unix as a tool forge and how Emacs fits in Unix philosophy”Submitted The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhttp://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf is about lack of computer systems research, and it touches on the problem you mention.
Comment linking /rob/utah2000.pdf
on “Why we need to create careers for research software engineers”Submitted Design of the Inferno Virtual Machine as a story · 5 points
HN discussionthe time for grand OS ideas has long passed. here's an eulogy by one of the authors of plan9 and inferno (you won't hear anything from the authors of other operating systems except tannenbaum): http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf
Comment linking /rob/utah2000.pdf
on “Inferno: A compact OS for building cross-platform distributed systems”Submitted Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionBe sure to also see http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" by Rob Pike
Comment linking /rob/utah2000.pdf
on “We Need More Operating Systems”Submitted Rob Pike: Systems software research is irrelevant (2000) as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
