
Myth: “CS Researchers Don't Publish Code or Data” - panic
http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2016/05/myth-cs-researchers-dont-publish-code.html
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macspoofing
The equally important point of a lot of CS research being locked away behind
proprietary paywalls isn't addressed in this post.

I spent some time in industry and then I went back to get my Masters in CS
which dropped me into the world reading and writing papers - something I
wasn't exposed to as an undergrad. I couldn't believe the amount of (good)
stuff out there. As programmer, you're used to reading blog posts, forums and
watching talks about some aspect of programming, but the academic world is
completely opaque to the professional developer even though there's a lot of
relevant research that would benefit non-academics.

Academia is very tuned to latest developments in private industry - CS
graduates, post-docs and professors follow and read the same sources coming
out of professional programmers and they get excited about the same stuff. On
the other hand, research done in academia is closed to working programmers -
and it's a shame for both sides.

~~~
pjmlp
I don't agree.

As a working programmer I get access to all the papers I want.

One just needs to care for the field.

Many authors provide their papers, or at least the drafts on their web sites.

Also many do gladly send copies if asked about them.

What I do agree, is that the majority of the working programmers I know
couldn't care less, they don't even read blogs, books or follow sites like HN.
Only when management says so.

~~~
devishard
Seriously? You're claiming that people don't have access because they don't
care for the field?

> Many authors provide their papers, or at least the drafts on their web
> sites.

Many authors provide their papers/drafts on their websites, but many don't--
not out of malice, but because it's hard to be a serious researcher and a
serious website maintainer at the same time.

> Also many do gladly send copies if asked about them.

Many authors gladly send copies of things if asked about them, but many don't
--again because a busy researcher can't spend all their time answering emails
from strangers.

And neither publishing the data on a bunch of disparate websites nor
responding to emails solves the problem of being able to search through papers
for the one you need. I've definitely gone through the effort of following a
bibliography reference, contacting the author, getting the paper two days
later, and discovering from the abstract that the paper is solving a different
problem than I thought.

Neither publishing the data on a bunch of disparate websites nor responding to
emails solves the problem of researchers dying and all of that disappearing.
I've run into this too: after trying to contact a researcher a few times to no
avail, I learned he had died in a car accident. That's one paper I may never
read.

> What I do agree, is that the majority of the working programmers I know
> couldn't care less, they don't even read blogs, books or follow sites like
> HN. Only when management says so.

That's not what the comment you're responding to said.

And even if it were true, you have to admit that there are still some industry
programmers who want to read more papers: I'm one, and if you've read HN the
last few days, you'd have found quite a few other industry programmers
complaining about the lack of access. So I have to conclude:

> As a working programmer I get access to all the papers I want.

Either this is simply a lie, or you do not have as much access as you think
you do.

~~~
pjmlp
> Either this is simply a lie, or you do not have as much access as you think
> you do.

ACM, Google, Yahoo, Bing.

~~~
devishard
What on earth makes you assume I'm not already using those things?

I'm actually skeptical that you're using those things on any sort of regular
basis: if you were, you'd surely have come across their limitations by now.

~~~
Bjartr
The best way to settle this would be to mention some papers you need access to
and he would share with us how he'd get to them.

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dagw
Perhaps. My problem is that most of the time the papers I find most
useful/interesting professionally aren't pure CS papers, but papers about
computational topics in applied fields, and the unwillingness to share source
code is staggering and very very sad.

------
amelius
I'm wondering what formalism people use for pseudocode in their papers, and if
this could be improved upon. I often get the feeling that authors invent new
programming languages just to write down some pseudocode.

