association-list

This paper is pos­si­bly the grimmest thing that I’ve read about com­puter sci­ence in years, and covers a lot of why I think that work­ing in the indus­try is boring and a lot of why I haven’t gone back to grad school. I don’t agree with all of it, though, and the sug­ges­tions aren’t really sug­ges­tions, more ‘just do the right thing already’ bitch­ing that doesn’t really get any­thing done. Of course, I don’t have the answers either, or I’d be pur­su­ing them. A lot of the trends that he’s pointed out have been con­tin­u­ing. There are pre­cious few new and inter­est­ing OSes out there, and the ones that there are don’t seem to get any trac­tion. It’s impos­si­ble to market a totally novel chip archi­tec­ture. Even Intel can’t manage it and there is no one in the world with more lever­age or money to spend on get­ting people to adopt and write soft­ware for some­thing. An enor­mous amount of money is spent devel­op­ing deeper and deeper emu­la­tion and vir­tu­al­iza­tion layers to get the stuff that we already have to work on new sys­tems and chips. The issue is that all of it is fun­da­men­tally boring. The OS and appli­ca­tions chicken and egg prob­lem is huge, and it’s likely to grow, with no end in sight. I think that if you asked most people today what the answer is, they’d likely say the web, which is pos­si­ble. If most appli­ca­tions are deliv­ered that way, then a new system really only needs a few appli­ca­tions: a win­dow­ing system, a C com­piler, a text editor and a web browser. This might allow for some inter­est­ing new oper­at­ing sys­tems to sprout up and make the cost of migra­tion between them lower, which is always a good thing. How­ever, it also reduces the urge to inno­vate or adopt new sys­tems, since most of what you’re doing is all on the web anyway, and if your system is good enough, there’s little real ben­e­fit to adopt­ing a new system.

Which brings us to the crux of the issue, which is pri­mar­ily that there are few new prob­lems that we’re trying to solve with com­put­ers. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of a new CS prob­lem that I’ve heard people talk­ing about. Ubi­comp, maybe, but most of the things that I’ve heard of as appli­ca­tions for it are just retreads of older things. There’s still a lot of inter­est in the old ones, and there are a lot of prob­lems yet to be solved, but there aren’t a whole lot of actual new topics. Noth­ing new under the sun? Maybe, but I feel like there must be some­thing that we’re miss­ing, whole cat­e­gories of new things that one can do with com­put­ers other than making better web servers at the top end and better web browsers at the bottom end.