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I’d have to say that academic research into programming languages has provided immense benefits for actual programmers over the years, it just has such a long l

I’d have to say that academic research into programming languages has provided immense benefits for actual programmers over the years, it just has such a long lead time that people forget that the research came out of academia in the first place. People also don’t really understand the process of how these ideas come from academia into mainstream programming languages. It only seems like academic research has diverged because the benefits of current research haven’t materialized as real, usable features in programming languages that people use to get work done. But if you look at features that we use in day-to-day programming right now, you can trace the heritage of these features back to research programming languages (like Self or Haskell) and then farther back to more abstract research into esoteric subjects like category theory and substructural logic. The esoteric parsers that people invented in the past were, in a sense, necessary because people were ignorant of how to design languages in such a way that they could support a rich syntax without using a complicated parser. It took a lot of academic research for us to figure out that, say, you could probably use an LALR parser for lots of existing languages, and you could stick to LL(1) for new designs.

cyber_kinetist 4y ago
That's a fair point. Maybe researchers needed to delve into all sorts of weird parser theories, to later figure out that they weren't that needed. Practicioneers mainly know the final result, but aren't usually interested in the full history of how people got to that conclusion. But I think during the recent decades, there has been a consensus that perverse incentives in academia are degrading research quality and preventing papers from becoming actually usable in real-life applications (mainly with the focus of paper metrics and the constant need to apply for grants). So although I think academia is still important long-term, I understand why some people would think it's becoming less useful.

cyber_kinetist 4y ago

That's a fair point. Maybe researchers needed to delve into all sorts of weird parser theories, to later figure out that they weren't that needed. Practicioneers mainly know the final result, but aren't usually interested in the full history of how people got to that conclusion. But I think during the recent decades, there has been a consensus that perverse incentives in academia are degrading research quality and preventing papers from becoming actually usable in real-life applications (mainly with the focus of paper metrics and the constant need to apply for grants). So although I think academia is still important long-term, I understand why some people would think it's becoming less useful.