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There was a window in time, more than a million internet years ago, when all of the good code was written by a bunch of 13 year olds. Assembly was used but mach

There was a window in time, more than a million internet years ago, when all of the good code was written by a bunch of 13 year olds. Assembly was used but machine code was the superior weapon of choice. Something like: These are the opcodes, we calculate things in hex, deal with it you noob. They were always there of course but the academics came in ever larger numbers and tried to forge something prestigious out of the field. These unsophisticated developers who didn't learn how to code started uttering all kinds of authoritatively sounding nonsense. While the 13 year olds bragged about their kung fu being better than yours the professors kept talking about how hard and labor intense everything was. Clear noob talk with a cherry on top. Tears from laughter.... I remember one kid saying: So it has to run on millions of computers and run for millions of cycles but we should sacrifice performance for ease of development? Because those poor developers bla bla bla? There was real elitism among the 13 year olds, no one cared for something that kind of worked, the prestige was all in squeezing out more performance. During academic construction the man behind the curtain was clearly visible. He wrote everything in basic because machine code was ohh so much to hard. His own words. A long story short: The ferengi alliance hired countless mercenaries and defeated the borg. Today you cant even send an sms message or distribute a text document without paying tribute to the grand nagus one way or another.

salawat 7y ago
...I think I actually understood that. Not sure whether I should be happy or not, but such is life Anyway, if my parsing is correct, this poster laments the way that academic publishing was subverted away from doing something unique and covering new ground through actually making substantial scientific breakthroughs in favor of higher visibility and accessibility where the metrics of having published something to be quoted by others became more important than publishing a truly revolutionary piece. This is paralleled by the shift in attitude w.r.t. programming languages. In the days of computing yore, the emphasis was around trying to wrangle the machine into doing what you wanted it to do, and you stayed as close to the metal while doing as possible to keep it fast, because you had to squeeze as much out of what you had as possible. You were comfortable with the software/hardware boundaries being present because that's what it took. As languages developed however, much of the "skill" at the time was chipped away at in the name of abstraction, modularity(many functions getting implemented as libraries), and linguistic/runtime hand holding by things like garbage collecting VM's. This overhead allowed more accessibility in terms of the initial knowledge and kill barrier to entry to be significantly lowered, as the challenge and prestige of wrestling with the machine to get things done performantly slowly gave way to maintaining an encyclopedic knowledge of libraries and frameworks that can be kludge together to give a roughly working facsimile of the desired system. Programming therefore degenerated from somewhat harder scientific endeavor to make breakthroughs in fully utilizing more performant hardware to the max with highly optimized and performant code, to using increased hardware performance as a buffer to allow sloppier, easier to think about abstractions to do the lifting, making software development a glorified popularity contest where frameworks of the week competed for more programmer mindshare for the sake of competing rather than actually doing something in and of themselves. This had the end goal of making terrible (in terms of minimal footprint to run) software easier to write, and easier to hire people to work with. That's what the poster seems to mean by "the Ferengi hired tons of mercenaries and defeated the Borg." The Borg being the 13 year old purist, the Ferengi being those that wanted terrible software that did well enough. Shift this back to academia, and you see the same dynamic. Academics are pushed to publish or perish, so the actual quality of scientific breakthrough has nose dived in favor of throwing as many results out there to be added to someone else's mindshare as possible. The entire network and incentive structure behind it being fiscally motivated by the interest of the closed access journals. Damn. Not the most straightforwardly worded, but I can see where this guy is coming from.
- kingludite 7y ago
  yes, you should be happy. You not just managed to understand but also managed to translate what I wrote into much more readable form. That said, I didn't mean to hate on academia. I just wanted to describe what creating a field looks like. They made a lot of effort and had the best of intentions but end of the day they all had to earn a living working for the man. That is the real issue and it lives outside academia for the most part. I also think of academia as the archivers of knowledge. They never take that as a compliment but it really is. I attempted to illustrate the different mind set [be it poorly]. Academics are respectful by default. 13 year olds are the exact opposite. To try a thought experiment: Imagine releasing software after you've insulted every programmer you know and made fun of every last bit of code they wrote. To put it mildly: You might want to have another look at your creation. You might want to do that every day for the next 2 weeks. You might want to scrap that feature if you cant sign of on it as the closest thing to perfection humanly possible.

salawat 7y ago

...I think I actually understood that. Not sure whether I should be happy or not, but such is life Anyway, if my parsing is correct, this poster laments the way that academic publishing was subverted away from doing something unique and covering new ground through actually making substantial scientific breakthroughs in favor of higher visibility and accessibility where the metrics of having published something to be quoted by others became more important than publishing a truly revolutionary piece. This is paralleled by the shift in attitude w.r.t. programming languages. In the days of computing yore, the emphasis was around trying to wrangle the machine into doing what you wanted it to do, and you stayed as close to the metal while doing as possible to keep it fast, because you had to squeeze as much out of what you had as possible. You were comfortable with the software/hardware boundaries being present because that's what it took. As languages developed however, much of the "skill" at the time was chipped away at in the name of abstraction, modularity(many functions getting implemented as libraries), and linguistic/runtime hand holding by things like garbage collecting VM's. This overhead allowed more accessibility in terms of the initial knowledge and kill barrier to entry to be significantly lowered, as the challenge and prestige of wrestling with the machine to get things done performantly slowly gave way to maintaining an encyclopedic knowledge of libraries and frameworks that can be kludge together to give a roughly working facsimile of the desired system. Programming therefore degenerated from somewhat harder scientific endeavor to make breakthroughs in fully utilizing more performant hardware to the max with highly optimized and performant code, to using increased hardware performance as a buffer to allow sloppier, easier to think about abstractions to do the lifting, making software development a glorified popularity contest where frameworks of the week competed for more programmer mindshare for the sake of competing rather than actually doing something in and of themselves. This had the end goal of making terrible (in terms of minimal footprint to run) software easier to write, and easier to hire people to work with. That's what the poster seems to mean by "the Ferengi hired tons of mercenaries and defeated the Borg." The Borg being the 13 year old purist, the Ferengi being those that wanted terrible software that did well enough. Shift this back to academia, and you see the same dynamic. Academics are pushed to publish or perish, so the actual quality of scientific breakthrough has nose dived in favor of throwing as many results out there to be added to someone else's mindshare as possible. The entire network and incentive structure behind it being fiscally motivated by the interest of the closed access journals. Damn. Not the most straightforwardly worded, but I can see where this guy is coming from.

kingludite 7y ago
yes, you should be happy. You not just managed to understand but also managed to translate what I wrote into much more readable form. That said, I didn't mean to hate on academia. I just wanted to describe what creating a field looks like. They made a lot of effort and had the best of intentions but end of the day they all had to earn a living working for the man. That is the real issue and it lives outside academia for the most part. I also think of academia as the archivers of knowledge. They never take that as a compliment but it really is. I attempted to illustrate the different mind set [be it poorly]. Academics are respectful by default. 13 year olds are the exact opposite. To try a thought experiment: Imagine releasing software after you've insulted every programmer you know and made fun of every last bit of code they wrote. To put it mildly: You might want to have another look at your creation. You might want to do that every day for the next 2 weeks. You might want to scrap that feature if you cant sign of on it as the closest thing to perfection humanly possible.