In some of the communities I hang around in1, there’s a fondness for the kind of industrial research that happened at places like PARC and Bell Labs. Things like Smalltalk, Mesa/Cedar, and Plan 9 not only introduced new ideas but demonstrated them in practical, working systems. If you want to actually do research like this, how should you go about it? There are a couple of obvious strategies. One is to look for unsolved problems — say, “addressing the scale-up problem in visual programm...
