Comment by StandardFuture | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StandardFuture | Hacker News Reader

Most of the comments in this discussion are missing the point of this article in almost its entirety. I am seeing everything from "Haskell is the most mathy of the languages and resolves an approach to algebraic concepts!" to "This article is bullshit!" ... Sad, really.

An easy way to summarize what this article is trying to convey can be derived from the title of the article: Systems Past. The next chapter would simply be: Systems Future. And this is what the author is trying to get across.

There is nothing wrong with languages or OSes. What's wrong is a seemingly pervasive attitude throughout the hacker community to never want to improve on foundational concepts. This is usually argued as: 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'.

One critique of this article I will give is: these software innovations are dependent on the hardware architectures used. And we have been using the same basic computer architecture for decades. So maybe it is not fair to assume revolutionary systems innovations should happen before we have revolutionary hardware systems to program?

I am very happy that you get the point! :-)

To address your criticism: Internetworking fundamentally required new hardware, Interactivity and Hypermedia depended on advances in display technology, and Virtualization and Transactions benefit substantially from hardware acceleration. However, the OS, the PL, and the GC were all independent of any new developments and hardware. Our display technologies are already way ahead of the computational features they should be able to support. Same goes for telecommunications. And the hardware acceleration that powers virtual memory and memory locking is versatile enough to be applied to more advanced abstractions as well (although the advanced abstractions might later benefit from more advanced acceleration).

I spent a few years at MIT trying to design revolutionary hardware systems and left with a deep respect for Intel. Much as I'd like to have a PC based on the Lisp Machine or the Connection Machine, I've come to believe it's we software folks who really aren't keeping up, rather than any kind of stagnation in the hardware world.

In fact, Intel comes out with a whole pile of new machine instructions every other year, and they probably never get invoked once on most PCs: most binaries are effectively compiled for AMD Opteron (the first x86_64 processor, released in 2003) so that they'll run seamlessly on anything since then.

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