5 ms·

> "I suppose that this is a good first step if you want to write a formal semantics of Rust in 𝕂, but it seems like there's not really enough here yet to be of

> "I suppose that this is a good first step if you want to write a formal semantics of Rust in 𝕂, but it seems like there's not really enough here yet to be of interest." I thing the work is interesting. It would be a great endeavor to model the whole language so you need people to help with that. But how would one know that someone has started a project like that if they don't publish something about it? In my opinion the whole story about only accepting "novel" and "readily applicable" results in academia isn't quite helpful. A "Publish early, publish often" strategy could produce more and better results in the long term I think. If a result isn't useful or novel on it's own that's no issue imo. It can still become an important building block of some later innovation! Reusable work done is work done, indifferently of it's "novelty" or direct applicability. Also the 𝕂 Framework is amazing for formal reasoning about languages so this work is indeed an important first step.

tom_mellior 9y ago
> A "Publish early, publish often" strategy could produce more and better results in the long term I think. That (at least the "publish early" part) is already the case for a lot of programming language research in things like semantics or program analysis. Published papers often treat a toy language (no arrays, no dynamic memory allocation, etc.) and leave the rest for "future work". Sometimes that future work does materialize, often it doesn't. It's a difficult situation for academia: If the basic system is too hard to extend to a full language, you will end up without final results, and from the point of view of your funders you have just wasted a lot of time and money. If it's too easy to extend to a realistic language, you might build a tool but end up doing "only engineering" without having new breakthroughs to publish, again seen in academia as wasting research funds. For many people in academia, the incentives for building systems really applicable to real-world languages are just not there.
- adrianN 9y ago
  It's a long, hard way from a research prototype to something that works on a machine different from the author's laptop. It's unclear whether paying researchers to build actual products makes sense. If there is a clear market for the application, there is always the possibility to start a spin-off company.
  - tom_mellior 9y ago
    Sure, but there are many many useful tools for which there is no clear market. I do think academic institutions should do more to value and promote development of useful artifacts. But that's difficult to do if rankings (of people and of institutions) are only based on academic publications, which (for the most part) don't include tool descriptions.
geezerjay 9y ago
> In my opinion the whole story about only accepting "novel" and "readily applicable" results in academia isn't quite helpful. A "Publish early, publish often" strategy could produce more and better results in the long term I think. I fail to see how publishing repeats of the same old conclusions that boil down to applying the same basic and well-known techniques to specific subsets of a trendy programming language, and in the process failing to provide anything meaningful, does anything to advance science. In fact, what does the article add to the understanding of the problem?
theoryisgood 9y ago
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07608 https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07608. This is an another paper, that maybe you are interested in. Even though they have almost the same name.

tom_mellior 9y ago

> A "Publish early, publish often" strategy could produce more and better results in the long term I think. That (at least the "publish early" part) is already the case for a lot of programming language research in things like semantics or program analysis. Published papers often treat a toy language (no arrays, no dynamic memory allocation, etc.) and leave the rest for "future work". Sometimes that future work does materialize, often it doesn't. It's a difficult situation for academia: If the basic system is too hard to extend to a full language, you will end up without final results, and from the point of view of your funders you have just wasted a lot of time and money. If it's too easy to extend to a realistic language, you might build a tool but end up doing "only engineering" without having new breakthroughs to publish, again seen in academia as wasting research funds. For many people in academia, the incentives for building systems really applicable to real-world languages are just not there.

adrianN 9y ago
It's a long, hard way from a research prototype to something that works on a machine different from the author's laptop. It's unclear whether paying researchers to build actual products makes sense. If there is a clear market for the application, there is always the possibility to start a spin-off company.
- tom_mellior 9y ago
  Sure, but there are many many useful tools for which there is no clear market. I do think academic institutions should do more to value and promote development of useful artifacts. But that's difficult to do if rankings (of people and of institutions) are only based on academic publications, which (for the most part) don't include tool descriptions.

geezerjay 9y ago

> In my opinion the whole story about only accepting "novel" and "readily applicable" results in academia isn't quite helpful. A "Publish early, publish often" strategy could produce more and better results in the long term I think. I fail to see how publishing repeats of the same old conclusions that boil down to applying the same basic and well-known techniques to specific subsets of a trendy programming language, and in the process failing to provide anything meaningful, does anything to advance science. In fact, what does the article add to the understanding of the problem?

theoryisgood 9y ago

https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07608 https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07608. This is an another paper, that maybe you are interested in. Even though they have almost the same name.