It's a tough crowd when being the authors of both the Unix and Plan 9 kernels isn't sufficient to get the benefit of the doubt on this matter!

That's probably the problem. When those guys say "systems", people expect they mean OS/kernel-level stuff.

> As the meme goes, they keep using the word "systems", I don't think it means what they think it means.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean what you think it means. The only title I have on my bookshelf which has "Systems Programming" in the title is System Software: An Introduction to Systems Programming. The book is about creating assemblers and compilers for a made-up architecture called SIC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIC/XE

This is neither here nor there, but the point is that a fair number of accomplished people in the field were apparently at one time less hung up about precisely what "systems programming" might mean and (this is just conjecture on my part, since honestly, who cares?) probably just used it as a contrast with applications programming.

Jeez.

These dudes were writing "systems" long before most folks here on HN were programming.

To me, and to them, "systems programming" has a particular meaning that does not include kernels. Like it means assemblers, compilers, web servers.j

I think they have more credibility about what it means than perhaps you do.

Before many HNers were even born too.

This is possible the worst example of selective quoting I've seen on HN.

From the bit you left out:

Want to write a server with thousands of communicating threads?

It's always been clear what kind of apps Go is targeted at, and it's never been operating systems.