Comments on: Believing in Computer Science

By: Brian Hurt

Brian Hurt — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 20:27:40 +0000

I wonder how much of this demand for revolutionary change comes from the commercial world’s need to sell software? One of the problems with selling software (in the old style, shrink wrap model) was the need to convince customers to stop using the old software in favor of buying new software. It’s not like software wore out or broke down or anything. So the model of bi-annual revolutions was adopted- each new release was touted as being completely new and revolutionary. This bled into the culture, in stark contradiction to the fact that most software development (even in the commercial world) is, in fact, evolutionary not revolutionary. You take (more or less) working code and make incremental changes- add a feature here, remove a bug there, and so on.

By: Robert Harper

Robert Harper — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 17:09:21 +0000

Thanks, corrected.

By: pindaroi

pindaroi — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 16:36:23 +0000

Did you mean amplifying in the second sentence?

Wonderful exposition of polarity in the following post.

By: Andrew Stellman (@AndrewStellman)

Andrew Stellman (@AndrewStellman) — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 16:08:47 +0000

Another problem may be that funding levels in all areas of research have plummeted (the payline in, say, NIH funded research is down many percentage points over the last fifteen years). When money gets tight, people spend more on lottery tickets.

The irony about funding agencies playing venture capitalist is that the venture capitalists have had such a lousy track record in actually funding breakthroughs. Have you noticed what venture capitalists are actually funding these days? I think Scott Adams did a pretty good job summing up the state of venture capital:

http://search.dilbert.com/search?day1=10&mth1=07&yr1=2012&day2=13&mth2=07&yr2=2012&x=37&y=21

Yes, that’s definitely the model we want to push forward the field.

By: hakatpat

hakatpat — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 16:01:30 +0000

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
- Isaac Newton

By: Derek Dreyer

Derek Dreyer — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 21:02:01 +0000

Great piece — I totally agree with Meyer as well. Indeed, I have argued as much in private for some time, and I know many who feel the same frustration. I’ve grown quite tired of the perennial complaints about how our existing conferences, journals, what have you, are prejudiced towards incremental research, as if it’s something to be shunned in favor of half-assed quirky revolutionary ideas that don’t work. Research is inherently incremental, and there’s no shame in it — rather, the *evolution* (as you put it) of great ideas is what makes research so exciting, to me at least.