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Becoming a layman's authority/source on a subject is not really the same as being on the "cutting edge of research" of the topic.

by Peaker 14y ago

batista 14y ago
>Becoming a layman's authority/source on a subject is not really the same as being on the "cutting edge of research" of the topic No, but doing something nobody else has done is not "Becoming a layman's authority/source on a subject" it's being on the "cutting edge of research" even if it's not academic research.
- noelwelsh 14y ago
  I'm sitting in a chair as I write this. Nobody else has sat in this chair today. Am I on the cutting edge of research? Similarly, writing a game in Haskell does not make you on the cutting edge of research.
  - batista 14y ago
    >I'm sitting in a chair as I write this. Nobody else has sat in this chair today. Am I on the cutting edge of research? No, but you're on the cutting edge of straw-man argumentation trivializing. Doing something that has been done very few times, or not ever, in a whole programming paradigm (building a game functionally) is qualitatively and quantitatively different than: doing something that has been done trivially for centuries just not in this particular day && by somebody else than you && in one piece of furniture you own (you sitting on a chair). If you cannot understand this, I guess it makes no sense further arguing about it.
    - noelwelsh 14y ago
      > No, but you're on the cutting edge of straw-man argumentation trivializing. If only I was that good! Research contributions generally have be novel AND significant. We have seen that novelty alone is not sufficient (sitting in the chair). Significant generally means applicable to a broad range of problems. Monads are significant, as one abstraction can encode a huge range of structures (containers, control flow, etc.) Building a game in Haskell is not a priori novel OR significant. People have done this before (e.g. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Frag http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Frag). Haskell has good facilities for managing concurrency and state. It's not obvious to me that one would need to go beyond these to build a game. A game would probably need to bind to some C libraries but I don't see this as a significant contribution. The original post made the following points: - Writing a game in Haskell in novel (No. See above.) - Writing a game in Haskell will generate significant contributions to the wider community. I don't see this. Furthermore, it trivialised the accomplishments of both the functional programming community and those who really are on the cutting edge of research.

Becoming a layman's authority/source on a subject is not really the same as being on the "cutting edge of research" of the topic.

by Peaker 14y ago

Becoming a layman's authority/source on a subject is not really the same as being on the "cutting edge of research" of the topic.

batista 14y ago

>Becoming a layman's authority/source on a subject is not really the same as being on the "cutting edge of research" of the topic No, but doing something nobody else has done is not "Becoming a layman's authority/source on a subject" it's being on the "cutting edge of research" even if it's not academic research.

noelwelsh 14y ago
I'm sitting in a chair as I write this. Nobody else has sat in this chair today. Am I on the cutting edge of research? Similarly, writing a game in Haskell does not make you on the cutting edge of research.
- batista 14y ago
  >I'm sitting in a chair as I write this. Nobody else has sat in this chair today. Am I on the cutting edge of research? No, but you're on the cutting edge of straw-man argumentation trivializing. Doing something that has been done very few times, or not ever, in a whole programming paradigm (building a game functionally) is qualitatively and quantitatively different than: doing something that has been done trivially for centuries just not in this particular day && by somebody else than you && in one piece of furniture you own (you sitting on a chair). If you cannot understand this, I guess it makes no sense further arguing about it.
  - noelwelsh 14y ago
    > No, but you're on the cutting edge of straw-man argumentation trivializing. If only I was that good! Research contributions generally have be novel AND significant. We have seen that novelty alone is not sufficient (sitting in the chair). Significant generally means applicable to a broad range of problems. Monads are significant, as one abstraction can encode a huge range of structures (containers, control flow, etc.) Building a game in Haskell is not a priori novel OR significant. People have done this before (e.g. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Frag http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Frag). Haskell has good facilities for managing concurrency and state. It's not obvious to me that one would need to go beyond these to build a game. A game would probably need to bind to some C libraries but I don't see this as a significant contribution. The original post made the following points: - Writing a game in Haskell in novel (No. See above.) - Writing a game in Haskell will generate significant contributions to the wider community. I don't see this. Furthermore, it trivialised the accomplishments of both the functional programming community and those who really are on the cutting edge of research.