Practical Quantum Computing is in a quantum state where it's at the same time around 10 years away and never gonna happen.

(To be serious: That's roughly true, you'll get credible scientific opinions on both. What's not true is what you occasionally read: That we're almost at a state where quantum computing will be a mass application.)

Indeed, it's not on the near horizon. I found this article illuminating:

The Case Against Quantum Computing - https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/the-case-agains...

> I argue that they can’t. In the physical world, continuous quantities (be they voltages or the parameters defining quantum-mechanical wave functions) can be neither measured nor manipulated exactly. That is, no continuously variable quantity can be made to have an exact value, including zero. To a mathematician, this might sound absurd, but this is the unquestionable reality of the world we live in, as any engineer knows.

Wasn't this problem addressed just recently? https://www.unibas.ch/en/News-Events/News/Uni-Research/The-g...

Dyakonov‘s opinions have been rebutted by many prominent quantum information scientists and physicists. To put it charitably, his arguments don’t agree with the consensus. Check out [1] as an example criticism of his writing.

[1] https://scirate.com/arxiv/1903.10760

The article is indeed interesting. I find this one addressing it https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/01/09/the-case-against-the-case...

As a researcher in the field, I think you should think about it because it's fun to think about... but I don't think you "have" to think about it yet.

Thanks. That's a pretty neat and tidy summary.

At this point most of the “practical” work seems to be proactive in nature; e.g., financial firms (such as GS) developing quantum solutions that aren’t currently useful, but will be extremely valuable if and when quantum computing can scale up to practical levels. In the meantime, general-purpose quantum languages (hybrid wrappers) are fun and genuinely interesting hobbies, but not much else.