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Academia is totally divorced from building things and is far more about internal politics, pumping up your internal brand, and doing juuuuuuust enough to get pu
by tedks 11y ago
Academia is totally divorced from building things and is far more about internal politics, pumping up your internal brand, and doing juuuuuuust enough to get published than it is about building things or even doing science. At least in computer science. You can look at the adoption of most CS academia (outside of machine learning, which is really a form of applied probability theory/math more than it is CS) in industry and get a very good idea of its relevance.
To get an idea of this, try to imagine how you would publish Docker. The OS/systems community is the closest fit, but containers have been around since 1998 as an academic concept, and they aren't novel. Getting them to actually work in a usable way on modern GNU/Linux distros is just engineering, and not academically interesting. There's no formalism, there's nothing trendy like sustainable computing, machine-assisted verification, or noSQL databases. Basically, all Docker really is is a thin layer of engineering around established OS concepts. It's been done. Strong reject.
I think wanting to build useful things for the common interest is a pretty worthwhile goal considering the entities that have historically done that, namely academia and governments, totally suck at it and are not going to get better anytime soon due to the entrenched misincentives that are totally pervasive in their respective areas.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoWe have conflicting views on this. I see academia as pretty much the only culture that actually builds interesting things in system software and CS research anymore, which I think should be quite an indictment on the industry, given how much academic software ends up abandonware quickly. Docker is an awful example. You actually have your history of containers off. By 1998, they weren't just academic, but already an emerging industry standard in at least IBM i machines. The only reason Docker exists is because an ex-Plan 9 developer (Al Viro) introduced namespaces into the Linux kernel to make the VFS model more tolerable, and some years later some Google developers lifted Solaris process contracts to make cgroups. The first and central part of Linux containers, then, is a direct result of half-assing an academic system software advance for its usefulness.
- tedks 11y agoI'm not in systems so I can't really make claims to that. (Obviously you're right about my getting the containers history wrong.) That said, spanner seems like it does what it needs to do far better than any academic system. For example. And there are many, many other academic pursuits that are totally ignored by industry. This can't be just narrow mindedness -- if there was any utility in, say, most of the type theory that's directly pumped from academia into Haskell, startups would be using it. But they aren't. They're not using that, they're not using academic database concepts, they're not using anything from academia. And virtually everything academic is open sourced at some point, so it's not like that's an excuse. (Are Plan 9 or Solaris academic systems? They're both the result of industrial R&D groups...)
- techdragon 11y agoPlan 9 is a mostly academic project. It was born out of the research lab and never really became a "product". Solaris was a 30 year series of successive engineering projects focused on providing valuable concrete improvements to what was previously just an academic project, the early unix releases were definitely academic regardless of their future commercial impact.
- tedks 11y agoThere's a very, very large difference between corporate research and actual academia. The motivation of the people involved are totally different. I wouldn't consider either project "academic" even if they were primarily conducted in industrial research labs.