System level still rocks
My professor of C++ says that nowadays there are extremely few projects that are executed using C++…Very few companies are running projects that require system level programming…Programming that requires deep understanding of the interrelationship between the hardware and the software…
This has been the popular opinion for quite some years now…and application development is the sexiest tag a programmer can ask for…making apps was where the moolah lay…
Yet…there are many situations today which prove that system programming is very much in the know…and that fundamental changes that are required in certain fields are accomplished only by system programming…
True innovation, I believe, is driven by the evolution of how low level software converses with the hardware…if we can innovate at this level…if greater performance is extracted at the lower levels…then apps naturally run better and perform better…
Truly pathbreaking devices that are in the news today are the result of awesome system programming…that is…writing software that controls the hardware very tightly…
The OLPC required great amounts of code rewriting to give the end user the benefits of low-power and low-cost computing. Although the OS is based on Linux…it is a highly customized edition that runs as the frontend…
Next…the Asus eeePC…the thin white 7-inch netbook pioneered by Asus…although the hardware is not new as is presumed…the reason behind the high success of the eeePC is the highly intuitive Linux edition that it runs on…The software makes it friggin easy to use even for grandma..!!
Next in line…is the highly desirable iPhone…As it is understood by very few…the true high points of iPhone lie not in its hardware…but in its UI and software…The iPhone runs a mobile version of the most sophisticated OS in the world…Mac OS X. And engineers at Apple have been constantly laboring on the OS since Steve Jobs took the stage in 1997…
Although these are but 3 examples…I have to tell you that I am writing this off-the-cuff…deeper thinking will reveal many more…
And making apps will continue to remain sexy…but they remain sexy because of the groundlevel innovations and feats of engineering…