Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: miller@cs.rochester.edu (Bradford Miller)
Subject: Re: Love, Religion, and Programming Technologies
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Date: Wed, 07 Jun 1995 11:00:36 -0400
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In article <3r3g6a$d6@maureen.teleport.com>, "David B. Lamkins"
<dlamkins@teleport.com> wrote:

> What's really frustrating is that the cross-pollination of ideas is
> so pathetically slow, mostly because people's natural tendency is to 
> block out anything far from their self-perceived norm...  That's why
> C++ users absolutely fawn over new clever ways of writing data structures
> like (to quote an example from a magazine that crossed my desk today)
> "arrays of arrays" -- a big yawn to Lispers.  On the other side, I'd
> kill for a really natural interface to the underlying OS, or a GUI
> framework as robust as those taken for granted by C++ users.

Don't look at it as something frustrating, look at it as a career opportunity.
Yes, you can take those 20 year old results from Lisp, and republish them
as "new" C++ results! Academic careers are made in this fashion (hint: you
don't have to be the author of the original result, just able to read it
and translate to the language de jour).

Look, for instance, at all the "numerical methods for C" type books that
are republications of code written originally in Fortran in the 60s....

Here's the trick to maintain academic honesty while seeming completely original:
write a TR with full references to the lisp literature, then write your paper
for whatever C++ conference you like, but only reference your TR. Nobody will
ever bother getting the TR but other university types, and WHO CARES, you're 
after the real job in industry that pays 6 figures, not a publish or perish
rathole that barely covers rent. Of course, even if you want to go in that
direction, there's only about 45 years of lisp results waiting to be
republished in C++ journals.

Remember that nobody reads anything that isn't "in their language", be it
computer programming or political spectrum. There's millions of ideas most
people will never bother trying to adapt to their own technology, because
they can't be bothered to learn to look under the surface syntax.

That's the secret to good research methodology, btw, think of how the same
problem might have come up in a different area, then see how they solved it.
