Re: [TUHS] Craft vs Research (Re: CMU Mach sources?

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 9:12 PM <tuhs@eric.allman.name> wrote:

> I think Larry is right, but also wrong.  I think I can speak from
> experience.
>
+1


>
> The goal of research is not to produce consumer-ready code, but to
> explore ideas.  Nasty things sometimes happen in that environment.
>
> But that doesn't mean that code doesn't have to work.

And BTW, Mach is an example of something that did work.  And it worked
"good enough" -- I think Ted's comments follow exactly these ideas.




> My introduction to coding on a research project was INGRES, at the time
> the competitor to System R (now DB/2, better known as "anything SQL")
> from IBM Research.  By the very nature of the problem, the main complaint
> was that "Relational Databases Cannot Work" --- so proving that they could was
> a major part of the research agenda.
>
> At one point (pre-commercial) INGRES stored the telecom wiring diagram of
> New York City.  It wasn't always a pleasant experience, but we learned a
> lot, mostly happy, most of the time.  A lot of our motivationwas because
> real people were using our code to do real work.  Had we hung them out in
> the wind to dry, we wouldn't have gotten that feedback, and frankly I
> think RDBMS wouldn't have progressed so far and so fast.
>
> But when I left INGRES I talked with Mike Stonebraker, who asked me
> where I thought the project should be going.  At that point I thought it
> was clear that the research objectives had been satisfied, and there was the
> beginnings of a commercial company to move it forward, so I advised that
> the old code base (which at that point I had written or
> substantially modified well over 50%) should be abandoned.  Do a new system
> from scratch, in any language, (and I quote) "even in LISP if that's the
> right decision."  Unfortunately the first version of Postgres
> was written in LISP --- my breed of humor was apparently unappreciated at
> that time.  But from a research perspective the goal was no longer to produce
> something that actually worked in the real world, but to explore new
> ideas, including bad ones.  I wasn't involved with Postgres personally,
> but I think Larry's analysis was essentially correct as I know it.
>
> I was extraordinarily lucky to have ended up at Berkeley in the mid-70s when
> UNIX was just becoming a "thing", and I can assure you that while there
> were a lot of people who just wanted to get their degrees, there was also
> a large cadre wanting to produce good stuff that could make peoples'
> lives better.
>
Well said thanks,
Clem

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