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Another Kay quote on the same subject: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 In the last 25 years or so, we ac

Another Kay quote on the same subject: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.

LaGrange 14y ago
The hilarious thing about this is, of course, that Shakespeare is actually popular culture, we just glorify it because it's older than the word we made for it. And it's good, of course, but praising it as some kind of pop-culture antithesis betrays lack of understanding of culture itself, and is an example of how many people mistake something that extremely mainstream (but 400 years ago) with arthouse movies. And to return to the issue of code quality, academia is not a magical land of perfect code. Code I read in academia, in scientific and bioinformatics code, was easily one of the worst I ever read, and I currently work on a huge codebase that started 10 years ago as someone's attempt to learn a new programming language. The "best" code comes either from obsession, or from requirements actually going down to the code quality itself — either because it's used for didactics, or because e.g. reliability requirements demand actual proof of correctness (which is rare, but there's some industrial code that actually has this requirement, see Maeslantkering).
- EzGraphs 14y ago
  Yeah - these are somewhat fuzzy categories and not diametrically opposed. I just think that there are certain pieces of software that are sort of "high culture" - meaning so influential and well thought out (Unix) or elegant (Lisp) that they merit close examination by later practitioners. As for academia, I think again there is a difference in intention (publication vs. production code) not necessarily quality. Academics tend to emphasize mathematical/theoretical under pinning and work from the general towards the specific - and some of the best have their eye on some specific applications. Coders in industry tend to work to solve today's problems - and the best do so in a way that is reasonably general and abstracted. Again, I tend to have this as a separate grouping in my mind.

LaGrange 14y ago

The hilarious thing about this is, of course, that Shakespeare is actually popular culture, we just glorify it because it's older than the word we made for it. And it's good, of course, but praising it as some kind of pop-culture antithesis betrays lack of understanding of culture itself, and is an example of how many people mistake something that extremely mainstream (but 400 years ago) with arthouse movies. And to return to the issue of code quality, academia is not a magical land of perfect code. Code I read in academia, in scientific and bioinformatics code, was easily one of the worst I ever read, and I currently work on a huge codebase that started 10 years ago as someone's attempt to learn a new programming language. The "best" code comes either from obsession, or from requirements actually going down to the code quality itself — either because it's used for didactics, or because e.g. reliability requirements demand actual proof of correctness (which is rare, but there's some industrial code that actually has this requirement, see Maeslantkering).

EzGraphs 14y ago
Yeah - these are somewhat fuzzy categories and not diametrically opposed. I just think that there are certain pieces of software that are sort of "high culture" - meaning so influential and well thought out (Unix) or elegant (Lisp) that they merit close examination by later practitioners. As for academia, I think again there is a difference in intention (publication vs. production code) not necessarily quality. Academics tend to emphasize mathematical/theoretical under pinning and work from the general towards the specific - and some of the best have their eye on some specific applications. Coders in industry tend to work to solve today's problems - and the best do so in a way that is reasonably general and abstracted. Again, I tend to have this as a separate grouping in my mind.