Justice Department to Open Broad, New Antitrust Review of Big Tech Companies

Re:Justice Department to Open Broad, New Antitrust Review of... by musicale on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @07:22PM (#20511091)

Apple hired people who did academic work on LLVM and static analysis, and this turned into real compilers that people use every day (as well as Swift, which enabled SwiftUI.) There are many other examples at other companies.

I would also note: in spite of "novelty" requirements for publication, we tend to see many of the same ideas recycled over and over. Which makes sense, because they tend to be good and useful ideas that may be fundamental to the discipline.

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Re:Justice Department to Open Broad, New Antitrust Review of... by Yoric on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @05:46AM (#20513591)

I didn't want to talk about compilers, because examples are different, and despite the fact that I work on compilers at the moment, I don't have as much in-depth knowledge as on programming languages. In particular, while I'm sure that there are a number of novel things in LLVM, I have no clue which ones. In Swift, though? I see quality of life improvements, but nothing remotely scientifically novel in terms.

Agreed about ideas being recycled over and over in academia.

Regardless, I believe that my point holds: it's very hard to judge "scientific progress" by looking at industry, because most of the time, you're looking at stuff that was discovered decades earlier.

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