3 ms·
Pike's pessimism in a way reminds me of the Bill Gates quote: We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the cha
by CalChris 8y ago
Pike's pessimism in a way reminds me of the Bill Gates quote:
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
Still some of his pessimism has been spot on. Linux is Unix and RISC-V is, well, the fifth RISC from Berkeley which was even then only codifying some principles Seymour Cray laid down (now with Cray vector instructions!).
But LLVM is more pliable and experimental (and slower) than GCC. Didn't see that coming. No one even remembers Netscape but Chrome and Firefox are not simply Netscape.
He's dead right on the over emphasis on measuring. I never even read the measurements section in papers. I'm only interested in the ideas. That said, recent conferences attach a badge to a paper which submits a verification artifact. That's useful, especially if I really want to dig into the paper.
- michaelmior 8y ago> I never even read the measurements section in papers. I'm only interested in the ideas. Genuinely curious, how do you identify if an idea is of any practical use without caring about measurements?
- CalChris 8y agoAn idea doesn't have to be practical and it certainly doesn't have to be immediately practical. I think useful is a locally greedy optimization and that is not in itself at all bad. I just think that an idea might be able to take you a little further, sometime, just not right now.
- michaelmior 8y agoThat's a fair point. I probably overemphasized the word practical in my original comment. I didn't mean immediately practical. (I assume you meant "doesn't" in your comment.) And I do agree that even ideas or systems which perform poorly could be imminently useful. But I personally find looking at measurements helpful to give me some sense as to whether or not the approach being proposed is suitable for solving problems I care about.
- CalChris 8y agoFor example, if you are reading the classic papers in a seminar, are you really even interested in their measurements? Well, if you are looking forward at new papers, I think the ideas come first. Remember, there's a ton of stuff to read. A buddy said he read two papers a day in grad school.
- irishsultan 8y agoIf you're reading classic papers then presumably they've already proven themselves worthy (by being considered classic)
- michaelmior 8y agoExactly. The thought process I go through in evaluating a new paper is certainly different from when I am reading older, proven work. But in both cases, I still personally care about the measurements.
- gnat 8y agoI think you meant "doesn't have to be immediately practical".
- azhenley 8y agoMeasurements presented in a paper are not a good indicator for whether an idea is practical. If the results weren't good, the paper wouldn't exist.
- michaelmior 8y agoUnfortunately, I've found this isn't always true, but I see your point.
- anon4242 8y agoSome ideas can be great in the small even if they won't scale. Not everything needs to be built for massive scale.
- michaelmior 8y agoI agree not everything needs to be built for massive scale. I didn't mention anything about scale in my comment.
- Upvoter33 8y agoStrong disagree here on the topic of measurement. While some papers are "idea" papers (and goodness is obvious), others are best evaluated through careful measurement, showing strengths and weaknesses of the approach. Bad evaluation will lead to bad conclusions about the merit of an idea.