Is D the Answer to the One vs. Two Language High ,Performance Computing Dilemma?

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:45:02 +0200
Joseph Rushton Wakeling <joseph.wakeling at webdrake.net> wrote:

> On 08/12/2013 05:57 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > On 8/11/13 4:45 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> >> On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 23:37:28 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
> >> wrote:
> >>> That's an odd thing to say seeing as a lot of CS academic
> >>> research is ten years ahead of the industry.
> >>
> >> I would personally venture to say that the publication practises of
> >> academia in general and CS in particular have many destructive and
> >> damaging aspects, and that industry-academia gap might be narrowed
> >> quite a bit if these were addressed.
> > 
> > Could be improved, sure. Destructive and damaging - I'd be curious
> > for some substantiation.
> 
> In the case of CS in particular, the publication system is different
> from much of academia because it's so strongly based around
> conferences and conference proceedings.  I'd say that's damaging in
> several ways.
> 
> First, it means people write to the submission deadline rather than
> to their work having reached a satisfactory point of readiness.  All
> other activities grind to a halt in the run-up to major conference
> deadlines -- you see students and postdocs in particular pulling
> all-nighters in order to make sure that everything gets done in time.
> 
> Besides the health implications of that, such a last-minute rush has
> plenty of scope for making mistakes or introducing errors, errors
> that will be in the permanent academic record with little scope for
> correction (conference proceedings generally don't carry errata).
> There are also more direct sources of bias -- e.g. if the work is
> based on user surveys, the chances are all the people in the lab
> _not_ working towards a paper deadline will be shanghaied into
> completing those surveys, disrupting their own work and also ensuring
> that the results are based on a very skewed selection of the
> population.
> 
> This pressure to deliver on deadline something that will be accepted
> by the conference can also lead to quite a superficial approach to
> the existing literature, with references skimmed quickly in order to
> find any random phrase that may support the current piece of work
> (even though on closer reading it may actually indicate the opposite).
> 
> The second source of damage comes via the conference review process.
> Because conferences are all-or-nothing affairs -- you get accepted or
> you don't -- there's a strong tendency to submit multiple papers
> presenting different facets of essentially the same work to multiple
> different conferences, just to ensure that _something_ gets
> accepted.  That means overwork both for the authors (who have to
> write all those extra papers) and also for conference referees, who
> have to deal with the resulting excess of papers.
> 
> Reviewers are also working to deadlines, and with a lot of papers to
> assess in a short space of time (which is very disruptive to their
> other work), that can lead to snap and very superficial judgements.
> If there's a discrepancy in the amount of work that has to be done --
> e.g. a "yes" means just a "yes", but a "no" means having to write a
> detailed report explaining why -- that can lead to accepting papers
> simply to lessen the workload.
> 
> There are also financial aspects -- because most conferences
> (understandably) won't accept papers unless at least one author comes
> to present, it means that authors' ability to publish their work can
> be constrained by their labs' ability to fund travel, accommodation
> and conference fees rather than by the quality of what they've done.
> 
> And finally, when all is done and dusted, the proceedings of
> conferences are almost invariably then locked up behind a publisher
> paywall, despite the fact that almost all the document preparation
> work is done by authors and conference volunteers.  How many tech
> businesses can afford the annual subscriptions to digital libraries?
> (I'm thinking small startups here.)
> 
> I suppose you could say that many of these issues are
> personal/professional failings of individual researchers or labs, but
> in my experience these failings are driven by the pressure to publish
> conference papers, and young researchers are pretty much trained to
> follow these working practices in order to succeed.
> 
> What particularly frustrates me about this particular situation is
> that the justification for the current system -- that computer
> science is too fast-moving for journal publication to keep up with
> the latest results -- simply doesn't hold water in an age of
> electronic publication.  It's habit and professional career
> structures, rather than the interests of research communication, that
> maintain the current system.
> 
> I could go on, but I think these examples will serve as
> substantiation. :-)

You really should post that somewhere as a "blog" article.