

The software community has rejected the best research in compilers/languages - scscsc
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/5/24633-logic-of-lemmings-in-compiler-innovation/fulltext

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spculler
This is not terribly surprising. The concepts behind the static type system of
ML - from back the late 70s - are still "groundbreaking" for industry
programmers. Virtual machine-based languages and automated memory management
were done several times over, but they were only taken seriously after being
massively marketed through Java.

I know a certain Unix junkie. She has chosen to stick to the old standbys of C
and Perl. She doesn't want to even look at revision control yet - "too
complicated" she says. Fortunately, this is just a hobby right now and she
isn't going out and doing commercial work in such a state, but if someone who
ostensibly is enjoying themselves programming isn't willing to go out and play
with languages and tools, I doubt the situation is much better for a
commercially-driven developer.

As long as our development environments are perpetually being replaced by new
ones, I think it will be an uphill battle to get the research tech to the
mainstream. New environments are almost always crude and barebones. By the
time they're mature, people are already starting to move on to the next one.
We can only hope for some stability in the future; at that point, the dynamics
of programming may take a major turn for the better.

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bayareaguy
As in mathematics, some of the best software research can be very hard for
practitioners to recognize, appreciate, learn and apply.

Part of the reason is developers rarely get the opportunity to try out
research ideas until enough success stories about them become mainstream. I
remember looking into Erlang years ago around the time some folks I knew at
Sendmail were looking into it but unfortunately nobody at my company would use
it. It was too weird at the time. But if I were working on the same thing
today I could easily reassure people by pointing to things like Amazon
SimpleDB.

These days I'd like to see more mainstream publications about checking and
reasoning tools like SPIN[1] and Coq[2] and techniques like Proof Carrying
Code[3] so that I can convince my management and peers to try them out.

1- <http://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html>

2- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq>

3- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-carrying_code>

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vicaya
Well, one of the best research in compilers and languages, IMHO is applying
static analysis and constraint solvers to practical systems (e.g. C) find bugs
and/or automatically generate tests to find bugs:

<http://www.stanford.edu/~engler/>

Coverity is a startup from such research. The new Klee paper is a good read as
well.

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10ren
_Another way to predict the future is to realize that it takes a very long
time--about 10 to 20 years--to get a technology out of the research lab and
into everyday life. It's very difficult to get brand new ideas out in less
than a decade; in the case of the transistor, it took almost 25 years. No
matter what you do, it may take several companies, several different groups of
people, several different areas of venture capital funding and more before you
get something back._ <http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/futures.htm>

Java took a bunch of academically proven ideas, and put them together in a way
that was workable for industry (and yes you're quite right, also marketed as
an web applet-language, which is remarkable for Java's failure at it).

Haskell (for example) first appeared in 1990. 1990+25 = 2015.

Possibly, what we are seeing is just the historical rate of technology
transfer.

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anamax
That just shows that "the best research in compilers/languages" doesn't
address the important problems as perceived by the software community.

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bwd
I believe that the author is ignoring the importance of libraries for
commercial work when bemoaning the slow uptake of lessons learned in language
research. Learning a new language does not take a long time in comparison to
the amount of time required to learn the APIs necessary to be really
productive.

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tophat02
Perhaps the people who do the "best research" in compilers/languages simply
suck at marketing.

Also, and I know this might be a heretical thing to say... maybe the ideas
just aren't that good.

