5 ms·
My late professor used to lament quite a lot about work being redone. Not a week went by without one or two papers/submissions/talks/works being mentioned with
by spockz 5y ago
My late professor used to lament quite a lot about work being redone. Not a week went by without one or two papers/submissions/talks/works being mentioned with an immediate followup like “this is the same as this paper from the 70/80/90” or “this is the same as this paper by that author”. I found it quite sad, both because of the apparent double work and because this whole catalogue of computer science material went unused because of the tirades instead of their being a constructive way to share it.
Although I very well can imagine the frustration, as I have seen the same things with libraries being reinvented, I think there is value in revisiting some problems in a different context. Maybe the problems are just not that of a big deal anymore in newer languages/eco systems even though they are fundamentally the same problem as in the 70s.
- geophile 5y agoOf course there is value in revisiting a problem. But you should know that you're doing it, and be able to say how your work relates to the earlier work. (Not denying that reimplementing things can be fun ...)
- leetrout 5y agoI think some of it is pure exposure. Developing a new interest in a topic can be inspirational to build things and without adequate access to prior art or knowing the right search terms can leave you lost and ignorant.
- fragmede 5y agohttps://wiki.c2.com/?ShouldersOfGiants https://wiki.c2.com/?ShouldersOfGiants Databases are interesting because they were the forefront of computing when it was invented, and they still are today. The computer science sorting algorithms and trees (and trie) go directly to how good (for all the different kinds of definitions of good) a database is. MongoDB threw out a ton of history in order to invent a different wheel, and it's faster for interesting reasons, but it's also for a different era than single monolith computing (aka Oracle DB). That doesn't mean MongoDB is appropriate for all situations, but that a fundamental precept of computing has changed. Used to be, there was room for maybe five computers in the whole world. Today, my computer has multiple virtual computers inside of it and they are treated as cattle, not pets. The work being redone is because (sometimes) the work has been invalidated by newer experiments. We're going to have to "redo" a lot work once dark matter is found as well.
- jd_mongodb 5y agoMongoDB is a classic example of the innovator's dilemma. In its first incarnation it had no ACID transactions, no joins, no Geo-Spatial indexes, no inverted indexes, no SQL query language etc. What it did have (which no relational database had at the time) was JSON as a coin of the realm and a distributed database model. Run the clock forward and MongoDB now competes on equal footing with relational databases for all those features but it still has the key competitive advantages of JSON as a native format and a distributed architecture.
- lillecarl 5y agoI wonder if this is where technological evolution will stagnate, when most people research an already solved and proven topic and nothing new happens, I saw some science YouTuber say development is still accelerating, wonder for how long until the next breakthrough!
- kitd 5y agoYou would think the CS discipline, of all disciplines, would be able to expose its history in an easily searchable format.
- Jugurtha 5y agoIronically, if there were a database that would allow querying for this type of things... What's the State of the Art on X ? Where are we on Y ? Has the problem in paper Z been solved ?
- lazide 5y agoCobblers children tend to go without shoes maybe? I suspect some of it is just the joy of solving (or trying to solve the problem) means the unsexy work of digging through hundreds or thousands of old papers gets forgotten. And looking at things with a fresh view (which isn’t going to happen after looking at all those old papers) does have value.
- gnufx 5y agoI think in a lot of cases, it's partly a question of where the material was (on paper, not necessarily in libraries, possibly at obscure conferences). That's the case for a various things I'd like to refer to, and the system I used for physics research was never written up anyway. In this context and example is information on Logica's RAPPORT, allegedly the first commercial, portable RDB, which had some significance in UK research support.
- amw-zero 5y agoSuch a format would not matter, because most programmers are anti-research, anti-math, and anti anything other than shipping Agile software.