Donald B. Gillies Lecture: Dr. Michael Stonebraker

Yes, this is a development that has happened over time and has become pretty severe. Michael Stonebraker has written/talked about this in the context of DBMS research, but to me the same issues are applicable to other fields as well. Slides: [LINK] Talk: [VIDEO] In short, the incentives/requirements in academia have changed so that producing working software is no longer feasible. He says he got his PhD with exactly 0 publications, became a professor with 5. Nowadays, you have to have 5 publications to get your PhD and god knows how many to become professor. That means 1 paper successfully published per year if you want to get your PhD in 5 years. Doing software is not possible, it is too risky and just takes too long. There's a lot more, I highly recommend the talk!

> academia’s ideal role is to simply advance human understanding in interesting ways Yes and no. This is an engineering science. In a pure science, the world is out there to explore and find out about, constraining what you do. An engineering science is very much about useful things we can build and how we can get better at doing that. Buildings that stay up and house people/things, planes that can fly, ships that float, that sort of thing. Without a world to find out about and without being constrained by stuff to build, things get a bit arbitrary. At that point, it's really more pure art than anything else. Math is sort of the exception where we allow that kind of freedom. Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math is a reminder of the dangers of applying that approach to other disciplines. Anyway, I think it is actually wrong to pin academia's irrelevance to this fundamental divide. The problems in industry aren't too easy / boring to be of interest to academics. They are too hard to be solvable by anyone with the current insane level of publication requirements. Michael Stonebraker talked about this in detail: [VIDEO] It's a great talk.

I often go back to this talk from Michael Stonebraker about, in his terms, the diarrhea of papers [1]. It's difficult to justify time towards anything that doesn't lead to a near-term publication or another line on your CV. [1] [VIDEO]

Yes. And this paper by Stonebreaker et al was the catalyst for that kind of thinking: [LINK] and his presentation: [VIDEO] Also, see this blog post: [LINK]

> compiler engineers have good reason Sure they have reasons. And for them , these reasons are "good". The problem is that what is good for the compiler engineers has ceased to align with what is good for most compiler users . The reasons for this are complex, but one huge one is that we all generally don't pay for compilers any longer, at least not directly. If you have paying customers, you don't pull stunts like that. Michael Stonebraker talked about a very similar phenomenon in database systems and research: [VIDEO] The observation I found particularly interesting is that the few commercial companies that still interact with research, and I think the same goes for compiler/optimizer engineering, are the "whales", companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook. Their needs are very different from most everyone else who doesn't run datacenter where a 0.1% performance increase can mean millions of dollars of cost savings and therefore be worth quite a bit of pain. Particularly when it is pain for others. > C values performance over safety No. Well, yes, because it doesn't value safety much at all. Certainly not when I started, which was with K&R C, so no type-checking at all for function calls, for example. What C values is DWITYTD, "Do What I Tell You To Do". C makes it possible for programmers to write code that performs well, it doesn't try to make code perform well. That's a crucial difference.

Michael Stonebraker (INGRES, Postgres, Vertica, VoltDB, SciDB - Turing Award winner for fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems - got a PhD in 1971 with zero publications, tenure from Berkeley in 1976 with 5) about the same problem, [VIDEO]

Yep, that is exactly my analysis of the situation: an actual compiler vendor would never ( could never) pull any of these stunts, or they'd simply go out of business in a jiffy. Alas, we all got suckered into "free", and now the compiler writers no longer listen to their users, because they are not their customers. Their customers are they PhD advisers and Google, Apple and maybe a few more "whales" as Stonebraker described them, lamenting a similar situation in databases. Their needs are almost completely different from the rest of us! For Google, a 0.1% performance improvement in one of their key applications is worth quite a bit of extra pain for their own developers, and pretty much an infinite amount of pain for other developers. [VIDEO]

The level of academic unhappiness with publishing and its surrounds is actually surprising to me. First, I never hear the counterargument.. that current publishing is OK. Does it exist, or is everyone unhappy while nothing changes? Second, I'm surprised at how much of a single institution academia seems to be. "Publish or Perish," for example, has to be supported by tenure committees, grant makers and such. Are they all the same? Michael Stonebraker^ suggests that tenure committees accept a limited number of papers on a resume. This is to encourage lower volume, higher quality publication. What stops some tenure committees from implementing such changes. I just don't understand what's locking everything into place. ^ [VIDEO]