The occasional scrivener

No Piker

For some reason (probably because I feel an itch to hack) I was thinking about Plan 9 today. So it seemed an omen that /. had a call for questions for Rob Pike, co-creator of Unix and Plan 9.

I read some of the links in the article, and this pessimistic view left me thinking. Pike’s point is that (academic) software research no longer matters. We’re in a sterile wasteland of Windows, Linux, and the Web. No new ideas are being explored.

Well, that’s fine as far as it goes, but a meme that’s brewing is the coming dominance of mobile devices and content — quite different from desktop or server computing.

These points from the article show some possible fields for research:

Only one GUI has ever been seriously tried, and its best ideas date from the 1970s. (In some ways, it’s been getting worse; today the screen is covered with confusing little pictures.) Surely there are other possibilities. (Linux’s interface isn’t even as good as Windows!)

Ties in nicely with this post.

There has been much talk about component architectures but only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts.

Again relevant in the mobile space.

The future is distributed computation, but the language community has done very little to address that possibility.

Who knows? Mobiles are getting more and more powerful. GPS, encryption need processing.

The Web has dominated how systems present and use information: the model is forced interaction; the user must go get it. Let’s go back to having the data come to the user instead.

Also very relevant from a user perspective. Data must come to you, when and where you want it, with a minimum of fuss.

Will academia pick up the thrown gauntlet? Lets hope someone does.

Posted at 23:56, in the comp category. Comments [0]
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