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From: pereira@research.att.com (Fernando Pereira)
Subject: Re: Language ecology (was: Is Visual Prolog "real" Prolog?)
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References: <317752DA.C2C@pdc.dk> <andrews.830314122@Turing.Stanford.EDU> <4m4ard$knq@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <4mda7n$7mk@mod-serv.dfki.uni-sb.de> <4mn8jk$pje@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> <pereira-0805962321250001@greeley.research.att.com> <4msjsf$r6c@news.irisa.fr>
Date: Sat, 11 May 1996 03:01:25 GMT
Lines: 71

In article <4msjsf$r6c@news.irisa.fr>, ridoux@irisa.fr wrote:

> In article <pereira-0805962321250001@greeley.research.att.com>,
pereira@research.att.com (Fernando Pereira) writes:
> ...
> |> 9. How will the answers to the previous questions, the implementation, the
> |> applications and the organizations that support it help the language find
> |> fertile soil and prosper?
> |> 
> |> To my mind, that is the *main* question for programming language
> |> researchers that want to see their work change the world of programming
> |> for the better. The problem they face is simple: the ecosystem for
> 
> I think that there is a more subtle way of seeing one's work change the world
> of programming than having one's language and system beeing accepted.  It is
> to see one's ideas dissolve (see note *) in the computing milieu and be
accepted
> in other languages and systems.
I fully agree. But I did not bring that up because I was more concerned
with the issue I discuss below.
>I give three examples.  During around 20 years
> of research on automatic memory management for pointer-free programming
> languages [...] Consider also when the first papers on relational data-bases
> were published, and when RDBMS became trendy.  Finally, when IBM started 
> distributing machines with their version of UNIX (~ 1993), they had a large 
> advertising campaign in newspaper (in France, at least) with several slogans 
> including one that went as follows "20 years ago, academics invented
UNIX, now 
> IBM is selling it". 
Academics? So much for truth in advertising... Seriously, those are good
examples. An even older one is the influence of of Algol-60 and Simula 67,
neither of which was very widely used, on other, widely-used languages
(Pascal, C, C++).
> Note that the 20 years champions of the ideas should
> not expect any form of gratitude; instead they should merely be happy. 
Note also
> that nobody is to be blamed for the delay.
But will research funders continue to be happy with such outcomes?
Creating a serious language implementation requires 10-100 person years,
at an approximate  cost of 1.5-15 M $US (including overhead for equipment,
etc.) That's a lot of money, and research funders are likely to ask for
concrete results from the investment, not just difficult-to-measure
diffuse influence on the field. Consider further that the same investment
could have provided summer and graduate student support for a good number
of theory faculty and their students, or industrial researchers, leading
maybe to such fundamental but patentable breakthroughs as public-key
cryptography.

So, even though I quite agree with your basic argument for the
intellectual rather than purely instrumental benefits of programming
language research, I worry that the argument does not play well with
funders and the wider CS research community, and hides a very real danger
for programming language research. It would not hurt if the community
could point to *both* intellectual influence and practical benefits
commensurate with the investments. Remember, large funded research
projects are a relatively recent phenomenon and are under serious threat
(see Andrew Odlyzko's ``The decline of unfettered research''
http://www.math.washington.edu/Special/comment/science.html). Furthermore,
it may be a bit disingenuous (in the style of the fox and grapes of the
fable) to claim that we are satisfied with pure long-term intellectual
influence. I doubt that many people would engage in the all-consuming
venture that is to implement well a modern programming language without
the hope that their efforts will be of direct use to a substantial
community *for real programming tasks*. (I'm speaking here from
experience).

-- 
Fernando Pereira
2B-441, AT&T Bell Laboratories
600 Mountain Ave, Murray Hill, NJ 07974-0636
pereira@research.att.com
