Re: Industry versus academia

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

You know -- I was going to ignore this thread entirely, but I felt I
just had to respond to this. While these messages are interesting, I
cannot quite believe the level of arrogance and ignorance they display
about programmers and managers "in the trenches". Maybe I'm just
reading them wrong.

Let me just add a couple of points for you to think about:

- In industry we are facing 17$/hour INFY programmers, and BPO
outsourcers from Israel and Australia.
- Managers are asked to deliver double the complexity in half the
time, and oh, btw, with half as much staff.
- And don't even get me started about vendors. Software companies buy
each other all the time, and licene prices usually go up.. where does
that leave enterprise developers, the ISV or the VAR markets? 
- Dan's message points out that marketing and mindshare are still the
Hard Problems (TM). So what else is new? (I could have told you that
in the 80's when the Lisp community was debating threads or the X
community was designing Unix desktop frameworks -- both these lost,
because they talked down to the programmers/market they were actually
offering tools for. Some may claim the battle is not over yet, but I
hope you get my point).

In summary, why do you all believe that the average programmer is
dumb, and does not want to learn new things? I don't see it that way
at all. (The pressures on an average American programmer with a
mortgage and kids -- given all the above -- is not that incomparable
to what a high-achieving undergraduate feels at MIT in terms of
learning scheme :). And managers are smarter than people here seem to
give them credit for.. they must understand where their work, and
yours incidentally, fit within the software ecosystem.. and more
importantly where software fits within the context of human economic
activity and the rest of the usual business value chain. Besides, in
engineering driven organizations.. most managers were engineers
themselves at one time, no? Didn't Dan hack code once? How can they
turn into status-quo seeking automatons after a couple of promotions?
Why do you believe they do?

If someone doesn't vote for a candidate, does it say something about
the candidate, his/her views/positions etc., or does it say something
about the voter? (Doesn't this apply for languages and tools as well?)

And finally, I'm well aware of the "programming is a craft" view. But
even craftsmen charge for their services.. so I don't quite know what
Michael is getting at when he says "programmers in industry wanting to
make money is a problem"? 

O' well. 

   Matt, this is one of the most cogent summaries of the language developer's
   dilemma I've ever read.  Thanks very much for your post -- I agree with
   essentially everything you said.  I will add that another problem is that
   too many programmers in industry are only there because they want to make
   money, and this attitude does not generate the best hackers (nothing wrong
   with wanting to make money, but if that's ALL you care about...).

   My conclusion after reading what you wrote is that there are only two kinds
   of language evolution that can happen:

   1) Industry-initiated and supported languages like java and C# that are
      very conservative languages whose main purpose is to make things easier
      on the average programmer without burdening them with much that's new.

   2) Grass-roots languages that come from academia or from motivated
      programmers (e.g. ocaml, lisp variants, perl, python, etc.).

   Sometimes, languages in the second category can migrate into the first (I
   see this happening with python).  In many cases, though, it won't happen,
   because most average programmers don't want to learn new ways of doing
   things.  From their perspective, I suppose it makes sense.

   Mike