Things I Learned from ACCU 2010

[Clemens]

Nick Sabalausky Wrote:

> "retard" <re at tard.com.invalid> wrote in message 
> news:hqt94i$2sgv$2 at digitalmars.com...
> > Fri, 23 Apr 2010 08:57:54 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> >
> >> On 04/23/2010 07:00 AM, Clemens wrote:
> >>> (As an aside, I'm generally a bit put off by the hostility towards
> >>> programming language research and theory in the D community. "We don't
> >>> need no stinking theory, we'll just roll our own ad-hoc solution which
> >>> will work much better because ivory-tower academics are completely out
> >>> of touch with reality anyway." Bleh.)
> >>
> >> I hope that trend has been definitively reversed.
> >>
> >> Andrei
> >
> > 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.

I have no formal education in computer science, in fact I'm a self-taught programmer, and I had no problem understanding several papers on Haskell which I was pointed towards. It might take some dedication in some cases, but as Andrei pointed out: the problems are hard.

> 
> 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).

Oh well. Thanks for proving my point.