> The reality is that building systems is really hard. It requires a lot of resources, and a lot of engineering. I think the incentive structures in academia aren't very suited for this kind of costly, risky systems-building research.
It’s a shame that this is lost on academic library weenies roleplaying as engineers. A prominent figure in my research area diagnosed the problems of incentivizing “minimal-publishable units” and that if these researchers were working on home computing, they would’ve just run circles around microproblems like whether the more verbose “remove_directory” is more usable than “rmdir,” and no one would’ve bothered with the unpublishable plumbing of building mice and browsers and interfaces.
> if these researchers were working on home computing, they would’ve just run circles around microproblems like whether the more verbose “remove_directory” is more usable than “rmdir,” and no one would’ve bothered with the unpublishable plumbing of building mice and browsers and interfaces.
I guess we're lucky that research labs like SRI (mouse and direct manipulation), Xerox PARC (WYSIWYG, GUI, Ethernet, laser printers, etc.), CERN and NCSA (web, browsers) had better systems researchers than the ones your friend is complaining about.
Regarding "remove_directory", Multics had user-friendly verbose names in addition to cryptic (but easy to type) abbreviations. Seems like another good idea that was lost in the transition to Unix.
I know a large section of the internet considers it edgy and cool to say things like this but you really should reflect inwardly on this comment and consider that what you're actually doing here is making a joke about child sexual abuse. People who have survived this horrendous crime may not see the funny side.
It’s a shame that this is lost on academic library weenies roleplaying as engineers. A prominent figure in my research area diagnosed the problems of incentivizing “minimal-publishable units” and that if these researchers were working on home computing, they would’ve just run circles around microproblems like whether the more verbose “remove_directory” is more usable than “rmdir,” and no one would’ve bothered with the unpublishable plumbing of building mice and browsers and interfaces.