On 21 January 2012 18:23, Shawn Morel <shawnmo...@me.com> wrote: > > Your response is enlightening in many ways.
Yours is deeply depressing, as it shows just how resilient the ivory tower researcher mentality still is. > After all, given that more or less robust implementations > of OMeta exist, if I truly understand, for example, > "nothing" the low level machine language, then I should > be able to spend an afternoon with OMeta and this year's > report's appendix and have a crude "nothing" interpreter. We're not all researchers. Only a few people are ever going to understand these ideas well enough to reimplement them. But they are not the only people that count: funders, entrepreneurs, and users have to be convinced to some degree of the value of the ideas too, or they will not flourish. Just look at all the good ideas in computer science that are still ignored decades after they were dreamed up. Many of them have come from the researchers at VPRI. In the past, computer scientists were stuck with publishing papers, like most scientists still are. Other researchers could try to reproduce their results; some might push their ideas into industry, and eventually we'd get products. But now, uniquely among the sciences, we can directly publish our experiments, so that anyone can try them. Keen end-users can play with them, other researchers can take them apart to find out how they work, developers can use them directly. This gives more and complementary routes to a wide range of degrees of understanding, from simply thinking "that's cool" to the traditional scientific reproduction of results. Merely convincing other researchers is not enough: at the very least, VPRI's constituency is developers; to the extent that it affects UIs, it extends to users too. There are plenty of important ideas in computer science and software engineering that are gathering dust in the annals of research because the relevant group has never warmed to them. I see two main reactions from the researchers themselves: 1. We don't want to be distracted. Well, don't be. Publish all your code on github or a similar service, and take no responsibility for it, don't answer any issues, reply to any comments, and feel free to rewind and replace the repository. Even so, people will love playing with the code you put up, will fork it, and will do interesting work with it. 2. The stuff we have is just temporary. People should wait for the finished version. I'll believe that when I see a finished release. Most academic projects never reach 1.0. You do both your intermediate work and your audience a disservice by not releasing the intermediate work: even if it really is as transient and unrelated to the final result as you claim, it'll help to build interest in your work, which deserves and needs that, and help your audience to follow you on your journey. Teaching of most subjects tends to recapitulate their historical development until they become mature; hence, throwing out early research prototypes facilitates this natural (and, for the researchers, zero-effort) didactic path. > I think it re-inforces for me how computer science is > really more of an "automation pop culture." > As a society, we've become engrossed with product You underestimate the importance of both pop culture and products to research. Research does not grow and prosper in some abstract academic noosphere, but in a corner of contemporary culture. Most people only ever get as far as pop culture and products. Researchers that get this tend to be more successful than those that don't. I'd like these particular researchers to be more successful (and in particular, more successful than they've been in the past) at promulgating their ideas, which is why I'm trying to encourage them to exploit easy ways to engage their audience. -- http://rrt.sc3d.org _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
