Very chicken & egg to me! I believe strongly in systems software research. Not just tuning systems & hunting for more throughput or other gains, but making malleable base abstractions & exposing them. Making new means to operate.
In this way, I agree with Pike: systems research often consigns itself to irrelevance. It should be bolder & more visible & more real.
I'll confess I think you're closer to what most people think of. But I also think there's a lack of words ideas & concepts of trying to better ground computing, and I think that work falls into the systems research bucket. And it's not active enough. We're kind of stuck. We are seeing some good systems work, but mainstream computing breached up on the shore 20 years ago & it's this discipline that needs to be the one helping shake us loose & getting us into more novel, useful paradigms of computing. The projects I listed- Yahoo Pipes, Node-RED, Oberon, Naked Objects- we need more big scale tries & there aren't enough.
In this way, I agree with Pike: systems research often consigns itself to irrelevance. It should be bolder & more visible & more real.
I'll confess I think you're closer to what most people think of. But I also think there's a lack of words ideas & concepts of trying to better ground computing, and I think that work falls into the systems research bucket. And it's not active enough. We're kind of stuck. We are seeing some good systems work, but mainstream computing breached up on the shore 20 years ago & it's this discipline that needs to be the one helping shake us loose & getting us into more novel, useful paradigms of computing. The projects I listed- Yahoo Pipes, Node-RED, Oberon, Naked Objects- we need more big scale tries & there aren't enough.