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In 2000, Rob Pike wrote Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (aka utah2000 or utah2k), on the decline in operating system research. It included a chart lamenting the stagnation in software and programming languages over the ten years from 1990 to 2000. I've updated it for 2014, which supports his point even more strongly:

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. Instead, we see a thriving software industry that largely ignores research, and a research community that writes papers rather than software. [...]

Linux's success may indeed be the single strongest argument for my thesis: The excitement generated by a clone of a decades-old operating system demonstrates the void that the systems software research community has failed to fill. [...]

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 try anything else. At the time, I didn't believe it. Today, I grudgingly accept that the claim may be true (Microsoft notwithstanding). A victim of its own success: portability led to ubiquity. That meant architecture didn't matter, so now there's only one. Linux is the hot new thing... but it's just another Unix. [...]

The world has decided how it wants computers to be. The systems software research community influenced that decision somewhat, but very little, and now it is shut out of the discussion. It has reached the point where I doubt that a brilliant systems project would even be funded, and if funded, wouldn't find the bodies to do the work. The odds of success were always low; now they're essentially zero.

What do you think? Are we doomed to keep reimplementing Unix for the next half a century?

Well we will probably not invent something truly groundbreaking so what I think will be the keyword for future operating systems will be refinement and specialization. Linux has been able to adapt to smp and virtualization but not without a cost as in ugly legacy interfaces. What would truly change the landscape would be new hardware that operates significantly different to today.

First, there are plenty of non-Unix-wannabes being developed.

Second, I'll echo Kazinsal - who is this guy to decide?

Who cares about research for the sake of research? We can do this better and deliver real products.

I think computer architectures have stabilized and most ways of doing things have solidified and anything that can be done better that has not been done is mainly held back with the massive rewriting of software that would be required.

It's sad that you say that because I very recently rewatched a talk by Bret Victor (someone posted it on the forums, http://vimeo.com/71278954).

Hi,



It's sad that you say that because I very recently rewatched a talk by Bret Victor (someone posted it on the forums, http://vimeo.com/71278954). At the end of it, he says that the reason why great innovation happened in the 1960's and 1970's is that although we had sufficient knowledge about things, we didn't have stagnated ideas on how things should be done. We didn't think of programming as just involving long streams of text, so we were willing to explore other ways. Once we do start having solidified ideas about everything, dogma sets in.

Cheers,
Shikhin