3 ms·
Have academic CS articles always had click-bait titles?
by david2ndaccount 6y ago
Have academic CS articles always had click-bait titles?
- adgjlsfhk1 6y agoGoto considered harmful is from 1968, so yes.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago"goto considered harmful" was at least not wrong. It didn't say who considered it harmful, but at least it was still presented as an opinion. This title states "Python is Faster Than C++", which neither implies that this is just an opinion, nor that it isn't an absolute statement. You have to figure out yourself that it's probably hyperbolic and just referring to special cases.
- redeyed 6y agoNot "Python is Faster Than C++" but "When Python is Faster Than C++"
- schot 6y agoA minor historical note on this: the original title of Dijkstra's text was "A Case Against the Goto Statement" and it was the Communications of the ACM editor (Niklaus Wirth) that changed it[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful
- bregma 6y agoIn 2021 the note would probably have been headlined "Academics hate programmers who use this one cool trick!!"
- unishark 6y agoI have noticed this a lot too. I'd guess is has to do with the importance of conferences over journals in CS (as opposed to nearby fields where journals dominate). Conferences tend to be more informal and forgiving of titles like that. Of course this is just a preprint. If they ultimately publish it somewhere the editors/reviewers may make them give a more conservative title.