Re: Industry versus academia

[Daniel Weinreb <address@hidden>]

Sundar Narasimhan wrote:

>   >In summary, why do you all believe that the average programmer is
>   >dumb, and does not want to learn new things? 
>   >
>   I, for one, am not saying that they are "dumb", but there are different 
>   tiers of people out
>   there who have different levels of skills and skill sets.  There isn't 
>   just one kind of "average
>   programmer".  There are different kinds of people who have different 
>   capabilities.  
>
>Well.. when you water it down to be non-controversial that statement
>becomes almost content-free.. for me at least. Replace programmer w/
>"plumber" and read that again -- why is that interesting? It's just a
>fact of life that we are all not the same. What else is new?
>
OK, look, I never said "the average programmer is dumb" in the first 
place, so I don't need
to defend myself against having said it.  If you have some disagreement 
with anything I actually
said, I'll be happy to discuss it.  I think I made a useful point about 
why commercial enterprises
are not deploying much of their resources into innovative programming 
languages in the direction
of Scheme and ML, much as I myself do appreciate the many virtues of 
such languages.

>
>As to application development problems.. to switch topics..
>what do you think of business models a-la www.virtusa.com?
>
I actually don't know what that is.

>
>My suggestion is that once BEA or IBM (websphere) acquires technology
>such as Ilog's JRules (you can buy me a beer for suggesting that :)
>and bundles it for < 400$ (or price for .Net CD's :) my view is that
>such end-user problems will disappear and the entire SI & custom
>app. market can and will cannibalize itself.
>
Well, it depends a lot on what problems you mean by "such end-user 
problems".

>  
>