Things I Learned from ACCU 2010

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 04/23/2010 10:40 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "retard"<re at tard.com.invalid>  wrote in message
>> Instead of hostility we now have blissful ignorance. Maybe I should post
>> here more often again..
>
> When the academic researchers keep their work squirreled away in academic
> circles and written in such a convoluted style that only other long-term
> ivory-tower residents can get far enough past the language to see the actual
> meaning, it's a wonder that *anyone* finds it surprising that programmers
> are ignorant of it.

The style of academic papers is not convoluted on purpose. The good 
papers discuss new solutions to difficult problems and therefore must be 
very precise so as to convey a trove of information in a short space.

Preparing a good academic paper may take six months or more. A magazine 
article of the same length may take an afternoon.

> And that's just the researchers that actually *do* know what they're doing.
> Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that the *majority* of academia
> actually knows it's head from it's ass (yea, that's right - I've brought it
> back to hostility).

That's a truism. Clearly there will be many foot soldiers and few 
generals in any field. The majority of developers can also be considered 
to not quite know what they're doing.

I've had an email diatribe with an acquaintance who had the same stance 
"academia sucks". He kept on going how pretentious and fake it was, and 
I couldn't figure where he was coming from, until one day when he 
mentioned he'd been an academist so he has first-hand experience. The 
problem was he was in the outer academic circles that go through the 
motions of research (author papers, hold conferences, publish 
proceedings and journals) but they aren't quite doing research. At that 
point I agreed with him.


Andrei