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

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 8/12/13 4:45 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling 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.

I'd agree a lot more with what follows if it weren't for workshops, 
symposia, and journals, which together complete quite a large spectrum 
of publication and debate venues, all with different tradeoffs.

> 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.

But that's a matter common to all deadline-oriented work. The tradeoffs 
are well known. Also, Journals and trade magazines don't have such.

> 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).

On the upside that's incentive for producing good-quality work. Indeed, 
conference proceedings are predictably better than workshops or 
non-peer-reviewed publications.

> 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.

I haven't seen anyone really complaining about it. Not sure what surveys 
you mention. Students who don't submit this time around have more time 
focusing on research.

> 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).

We're all guilty of that to a small extent. Generally people are good at 
picking relevant literature, and my advisers were very careful in 
reviewing quotations.

> 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.

That may happen at second and third tier venues. Good conferences accept 
good research, which means a submitter won't risk a rejection by 
chopping work in multiple pieces and submitting it separately. Never 
really heard of a labmate doing this.

> 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.

Agreed.

> 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.

Journal papers.

> 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.)

Many academists defend the likes of IEEE etc., which use the funds 
gathered that way for good purposes. I know most conferences don't 
prevent their authors from putting their work online. In CS it is very 
rarely the case that a paper cannot be found without having to pay for 
it, and in those rare cases a little social engineering gets you the 
paper (I wrote the author and got it once).

> 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. :-)

Well I'm unconvinced but this seems to be one of those potayto-potahto 
kind of things. I do agree the situation can improve.



Andrei