Subject: Re: what we're up against
From: Craig Chambers (chambers@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 09 2001 - 11:40:09 PST
Wow. I thought PL design had that rap, but I am surprised people think static
&/or dynamic analysis are dead and useless.
I fight battles about how we should teach people to program, and I hear concerns
about how are we going to find faculty to teach these courses, if they include
such newfangled and obscure ideas like "objects", "data
abstraction", and "garbage collection". I think we should require such
"dead and useless faculty" to take some refresher courses on modern PL and
program analysis.
I had a similar reaction when I, half-joking, suggested that we teach 326 (ugrad
data structures) in a language like ML, thinking that pattern-matching etc.
would make it easy to express algorithms, in contrast to C or C++. I was told,
in no uncertain terms, that 326 wasn't about pushing some language religion, but
about algorithms, so using C or C++ was right.
Sigh, sigh, sigh.
-- Craig
Todd D Millstein wrote:
>
> An anecdote:
>
> I happened to go to lunch today with an unnamed faculty member. In the
> course of discussing an unnamed faculty candidate, the faculty member said
> that one downside of the candidate was his/her interest in static analysis
> and dynamic analysis, and this faculty member, whose research is unrelated
> to these areas, had heard that static and dynamic analysis are dead fields
> -- people have been doing them for 20 years, and there's nothing more to
> do that can be done.
>
> I found this comment astounding and disturbing. I think this faculty
> member was completely well meaning, but how does somebody take on faith
> that a huge area of research (arguably encompassing much of programming
> languages, compilers, and software engineering) is dead? And how does
> this impression get started in the first place? Worse, I get the uneasy
> feeling that this faculty member is not alone.
>
> Why does our field get such bad PR? Is it more deserved than other
> fields? If so, how can we address that? If not, how can we change the
> way we present our work to affect public opinion more positively?
>
> Todd
>
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> Cecil@cs.washington.edu
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