
The Evolution of CS Papers - seanmcdirmid
http://tagide.com/blog/2014/02/the-evolution-of-cs-papers
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skywhopper
This is a common trend in academic journals unfortunately. Journals that
accept only highly mathematical, theoretical, and statistics-filled articles
have, in many disciplines, become the "top" journals, and universities expect
their faculty to publish primarily in those journals, which creates a self-
sustaining cycle of more and more abstract topics of less and less practical
importance.

Thus, truly practical research (yes, research) appears in blogs and "low-end"
journals, and doesn't get credit. But which articles are actually impacting
the general knowledge of humanity in a more positive manner?

The technical, mathematical papers have their place, but the separation of
academia from the concerns of practitioners is only contributing to the
growing consensus among politicians and the public that universities aren't
worth subsidizing, that what you learn there is not applicable in the real
world, and that college should be transformed into something more like a trade
school.

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unwind
Nice, but for some reason the link is to a point "below the fold", hiding the
headline and the starting paragraph.

The proper link is simply [http://tagide.com/blog/2014/02/the-evolution-of-cs-
papers/](http://tagide.com/blog/2014/02/the-evolution-of-cs-papers/).

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Sorry about that, I would update the submission if it wasn't too late.

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kerkeslager
This trend doesn't mean that these opinion pieces are no longer being written
--it only means that they are no longer being submitted to peer-reviewed
journals. Instead, people are putting them on blogs and personal websites: for
examples, see
[here]([http://www.joelonsoftware.com/](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/)),
[here]([https://www.schneier.com/](https://www.schneier.com/)), and
[here]([http://norvig.com/](http://norvig.com/)). In recent decades, blogs and
personal websites have been extremely influential on computer science,
especially within industry.

I don't have enough data to make a claim about what has caused this trend, but
I do think it's a positive thing for the field. Opinion pieces don't really
belong in academia. We need sources of objective information, and academic,
peer-reviewed research is quite intentionally designed to fulfill that role.
On the other side, opinion pieces don't benefit much from academia: peer
review of opinions is usually just as subjective as the opinion being
reviewed, and the nature of blogs and personal websites is such that they
actually disemminate their ideas to a broader audience (many academic papers
are behind paywalls).

TL;DR: Academia doesn't need opinion pieces, and opinion pieces don't need
academia. Both serve important roles in the field of computer science, but
they don't need to mix.

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j2kun
I think the author makes the volume of mathematically inclined CS research
seem smaller than it is. Once computational complexity was born as a field, no
reputable algorithm was published without a strong analysis by combinatorial
optimization experts and complexity theorists. And now terms like
2-approximation algorithm and NP-hard are standard measures.

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yoha
I did not know that programming had been influenced so directly by white
papers, and by Dijkstra himself (even Firefox autocorrection knows him!). I
had heard about his reaction to GOTOs but it seemed more of a rant than an
actual proposal. In the case of call frame, we see that research have had a
direct impact on the design of programming languages. In a way, it makes sense
as researchers were the ones who programmed most, at the time.

~~~
jmct
Programming is still heavily influenced by research. Modern type systems,
concurrent algorithms, compiler frameworks like LLVM, and lots of other great
things have come straight out of academic research.

I don't understand why the Hacker News community tends to downplay the effect
of pure CS research and the programming ability of people in academia.

~~~
greenyoda
_" I don't understand why the Hacker News community tends to downplay the
effect of pure CS research and the programming ability of people in
academia."_

The author of this article, in fact, seems to be a rather accomplished
programmer as well as an academic. Here's her "about" page:

[http://tagide.com/about.html](http://tagide.com/about.html)

When I was in academia, I had the privilege of meeting some people with really
impressive programming talent. And some of the pure CS research I saw had some
very interesting applications, such as string matching algorithms that could
be applied to DNA sequencing. (Of course, there were people who were extremely
talented at bullshit too, but the quality of people varies anywhere you go.)

