Here is the highest complement I can give to any computing science paper: it reminds me of certain Edsgar Djiksta's writing.<p>Here are some of the particular lines that catch my attention each time I read this (I end up seeing this presentation every year or so, through some link or forum or another):<p>"When did you last see an exciting non-commercial demo?" When did you last see an exciting commercial one ? It's all crap, not just the academic side. I quit the ACM because I got tired of reading "X 3.0 is the new X 2.0" articles. Remember back in the early days of shareware, when you could write a DOS program that did one thing, like a mortgage calculator, and it would get passed around all the BBS's and become famous for a couple of weeks ? Most current programing is just that, but they are re-doing the one-off fadish programs for the newer platforms, web and smart phones and etc.<p>"Instead, we see a thriving software industry that largely ignores research, and a research community that writes papers rather than software." I'm not sure this is that special to computing science. I think educational and research institutions quit mattering so much several decades ago.<p>"Linux's cleverness is not in the software, but in the development model, hardly a triumph of academic CS (especially software engineering) by any measure." I think the development model is very important, as important as the assembly line and interchangeable parts is to automotive engineering. One can design the best car in the world, but if it can't be cranked out at the rate of one every 10 seconds it will never matter in the world.<p>"invention has been replaced by observation" This applies to a lot of academic stuff theses days. At certain conferences, there are papers presented that are nothing more than graphs of the number of papers in that field, a kind of pitch to convince people a particular field is the new hot thing. I suppose they include their paper-about-papers in the next set of numbers for the next paper-about-papers.
<i>Linux may fall into the Macintosh trap: smug isolation leading to (near) obsolescence.</i><p>Heh. Predictions of the future are always amusing... especially when you live in that predicted future :)<p>(I hear nobody is using that old "Linux" thing these days. And Macs; they're totally dead.)
Shouldn't be surprising, systems is a mature subfield at this point. There's still useful work happening for sure, but it won't be as sexy or as (regularly) revolutionary as it used to be. The discoveries with the biggest impact in any field happen early on, even if later research is equally novel or intellectually rewarding.
Speaking of Microsoft, C# and VB have picked up a host of features from academic languages. This eight-year old essay is obsolete.<p>-systems grad student (fair disclaimer)
Here's some interesting systems software research:<p>GIGA+: Scalable Directories for Shared File Systems, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N36SE2T48Q" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N36SE2T48Q</a>