Path: csiph.com!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder3.hal-mli.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!transit3.readnews.com!news-out.readnews.com!news-xxxfer.readnews.com!news.misty.com!news.iecc.com!nerds-end From: Michael Dunlavey Newsgroups: comp.compilers Subject: Re: Have we reached the asymptotic plateau of innovation in programming language design? Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2012 16:07:33 -0500 Organization: Compilers Central Lines: 50 Sender: news@iecc.com Approved: comp.compilers@iecc.com Message-ID: <12-03-020@comp.compilers> References: <12-03-012@comp.compilers> <12-03-017@comp.compilers> NNTP-Posting-Host: news.iecc.com X-Trace: leila.iecc.com 1331329141 73331 64.57.183.58 (9 Mar 2012 21:39:01 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@iecc.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2012 21:39:01 +0000 (UTC) Keywords: history, design Posted-Date: 09 Mar 2012 16:39:01 EST X-submission-address: compilers@iecc.com X-moderator-address: compilers-request@iecc.com X-FAQ-and-archives: http://compilers.iecc.com Xref: csiph.com comp.compilers:487 Responding to postings by Rui Marcel and Ian Lance Taylor: Is there a plateau? In C.S. grad school my fellow students and I were proud that we were limited only by our imaginations. I've since come to realize, at least in my case, that's a pretty severe limit. Industry is a font of interesting, challenging, real-world problems that could have served us well, but to which we had no exposure. Later I taught at the college level for 4 years, but after that spent the rest of my career in industry. I think C.S. academia is seriously out of touch with reality. There needs to be a much stronger two-way flow of information between industry and teaching than there is now in C.S. My experience as an engineering student in Mechanical Engineering and Civil Engineering was far different, in which partnership with real practitioners brought a flood of realistic problems to solve into the academic world, enriching it immeasurably. I felt strongly enough about this that I wrote a book: "Building Better Applications" which did not sell very well, but at least got my ideas out there, which revolved around the application of information theory as an underlying "physics" of computation. This affects two areas in particular - performance tuning and domain-specific-languages. These are not just "academic" matters, they are very important in real software engineering. Performance tuning is important because, while students are taught all about big-O and algorithms, they write monstrously complicated systems in industry that are orders of magnitude slower than need be, in constant factors. They do not know how to tune for performance. They have been told profilers are pretty good for that, starting with gprof. It is hard to be charitable about this, but even the original authors of gprof did not claim it was good for much. The only way I can explain this is that the people teaching about profilers have never had to significantly optimize a real piece of industrial software. Domain specific languages are important because, when properly done (which they often are not) they allow programmers to achieve results with one or two orders of magnitude less code and bugs, with far better maintainability. What happens in academia instead is people are following the latest butterfly - functional programming, logic programming, whatever buzzword they think they can latch on to and join friends to write papers surveying so they can puff their publication count so they can get tenure. Just once they should go participate in a real programming team and see what the real problems are and see if they can do anything to help. Grrr... ;-) Michael R. Dunlavey, Ph.D.