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What's Worked in Computer Science

Accepted submission by Phoenix666 at 2015-11-25 15:15:02
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In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of “computer systems research” [microsoft.com]. Here are his opinions from 1999 on “what worked”.

Yes

Virtual memory
Address spaces
Packet nets
Objects / subtypes
RDB and SQL
Transactions
Bitmaps and GUIs
Web
Algorithms

Maybe

Parallelism
RISC
Garbage collection
Reuse

No

Capabilities
Fancy type systems
Functional programming
Formal methods
Software engineering
RPC
Distributed computing
Security

Basically everything that was a Yes in 1999 is still important today.

The article is a current snapshot on those issues [danluu.com]. Do you agree?


Original Submission