

How can we spark the movement of research into production? - lemming
http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/7/22/how-can-we-spark-the-movement-of-research-out-of-the-ivory-t.html

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lemming
This is a really interesting topic, I think. I read a lot of papers on
distributed systems, and while many of the systems are conceptually not
terribly complicated, there's a huge leap from understanding the concept to
making it work. A good example of this is "Paxos made live" - conceptually
Paxos is relatively simple, but even a top engineering team at Google had
trouble implementing it well.

In the comments the point was also made that academics are simply not rewarded
for making their work accessible - the theoretical work is everything. I made
my first contact with a friend (and now colleague) asking him when he planned
to implement a feature in the open source library based on his research. He
said he had very little incentive to implement it having proved it correct.
Until this changes, I think this barrier is unnecessarily high.

