Re: [Fwd: Re: Industry versus academia]

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

Hi, John: Still doing those tank simulators? (I worked on a simnet
follow on called Stow circa 98 so ran across Mak at the time :)

   As someone who runs a software company in the expensive Northeast US,
   I know that it is very hard to compete on an equal basis with
   competitors whose costs are much lower (try explaining the benefits of
   paying *more* per hour to a DCAA auditor).  I would think that one of
   the only competitive advantages one could leverage, given that one's
   costs are going to be higher, would be the increased efficiency of
   better programming languages and/or tools.

This is what I was trying to point out, but not many here seem to have
truly faced up to the economic realities of what's happening out there
in the market. Maybe it's because in their businesses/markets they
haven't run into such pressures yet. But it's only a matter of time.

   I wonder whether the thousands of developers whose jobs are moving
   off-shore would have jumped at the chance to learn (say) Lisp if they
   really knew their jobs were at stake.  I wonder if their management
   would have even recognized this were the case in time to present the
   choice to those employees.  I wonder if management recognized this
   were the case, whether they would have cared enough to present the
   choice.

My question for you is that if this were true (i.e. cool academic
languages provide competitive advantages to programmers) wouldn't a
mass migration to such tools/languages have already occurred? Or do
you believe in your own version of your "most people are too stupid"
reason/excuse .. which is "managers are stupid so can't recognize
this" or .. "people don't realize their jobs are about to disappaear"
or "marketing for such cool solutions that academia knows about is non
existent because there's no one to do it"?

For some amusement...see

http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

I don't really believe Tiobe, but I do note that C# jumped and PHP
went down last month -- Lisp and others continue not to make A :)
Judging from this list, I'd venture that python should make A, but
time will tell.