Operating systems (OSes) represent a very large topic and for decades they have been dominated by a single approach: Unix. Indeed, most of modern systems including the majority of GNU/Linux distributions, the *BSDs, and macOS follow the Unix design. (Windows does not, but it does not have many interesting features for the matter at hand.)

In 2000, Rob Pike gave a talk on why Systems Software Research is Irrelevant. Whether out of pessimism or disregard for the community, it seems to completely discard the far cries that many Unix users had compiled in 1994 in The Unix-Haters Handbook. While purposefully sarcastic, this book pointed out some critical issues with Unix systems that still today haven’t really been addressed.

In 2006, Eelco Dosltra published his thesis, The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model, which introduces Nix, a functional package manager. In 2008, he published NixOS: A Purely Functional Linux Distribution. While NixOS reuses a lot of free software that were traditionally meant for Unix-style systems, it departs so much from the Unix design and philosophy that it can hardly be referred to as a “Unix” system anymore.

Nix is a giant step forward in operating system research. Not only does it address most of the criticism of Unix (including those found in the Unix Haters Handbook), it also paves the way for many more features and research explorations that could be critical in this day and age where topics like reliability and trust are at the center of many scientific, but also social and political debates.

Pike was wrong. And this proves another more general point: it’s probably wiser to refrain from claiming that any research has become irrelevant, unless you can prove that no further development is possible. And the Utah talk was hardly a mathematical proof. It only served to further entrench the idea that Unix is “good enough” and that we’ve got to live on with its idiosyncrasies and issues.

This unnecessary pessimism was thankfully short-sighted and would not live long before Nix proved it wrong only a couple of years later.