[aiisjustanif]

Ignorant person here, why is systems (assuming specifically OS) research dying? I just assume computer science related research in general is stable. I would think OS research would be quite stable as well but maybe I’m naive.

[riedel]

I am seeing a tendency that system research is very much underappreciated (not only OS). To me personally there is kind of a crisis in terms of methodology. People in my area (ubicomp, not the classical USENIX crowd) got fed up with too much of "yet another" and moving sideways. No research methodology to see things moving forward. The most frustrating thing in my area to me is that we are still teaching achievements at PARC on how to connect to right printer or include people into an overlay network based on context. In reality there wasn't much achievement over boring client server architectures with operating systems just focussing at getting those faster. Out of frustration the community largely moved to human interaction and data analytics. In the end IMHO it might have been the missing business models that then influence the available funding that triggered much of the missing love in the area. You need to give researchers incentives..

[aiisjustanif]

Ahh, that’s a fair critique.

[amelius]

Asian companies are still churning out new OSes all the time.

Also, big area of research right now is how to sandbox applications properly in this era of app stores.

[ganzuul]

Nobody knows what you mean when you downvote an on-topic post. You have to say something, else you only cause confusion.

Back on topic:

Systems theory seems to basically be object-oriented, meaning it sometimes has problems dealing with self-reference. This should not be a problem for most practical applications but for things like ecological dynamics the complexity is not user friendly.

Cybernetics seems to be a function-oriented approach to the same problem class. It deals with feedback loops as first-order citizens, which in complex ecosystems like desktop operating systems means it has less of a conceptual impedance mismatch.

The former is the popular discipline while the latter fell out of favor decades ago. Perhaps it is time to dust it off.

[aiisjustanif]

I didn’t downvote? I upvoted OP and the parent comment. It was all very insightful.

[ganzuul]

Excuse me it wasn't directed at you. People seem to use the downvote function to say they disagree, or don't understand, but that leaves the poster completely in the dark about what they think the problem is. I find it counterproductive and frustrating.

[ganzuul]

Absurd. Perplexing. Truly these people are mad.