Re:Debugging memory leaks in Ruby
by the_af on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @09:17AM
(#9303261)
> The mission of programming language designers should be to help programmers do their jobs better, not design something elegant/interesting/powerful/expressive/[buzzword]. Those things are all good, but only in the service of programs with fewer bugs and shorter time-to-market.
That may be true for programming language designers, but I'm afraid you misunderstand what CS is all about. Hint: it's not about time-to-market. The job of CS is to explore the theory -- precisely how to do something in interesting/elegant/expressive ways. Its job is to explore the theoretical and practical underpinnings of computing; to provide proofs; to explore the abstract and formal systems behind software. CS is not necessarily directly applicable to enterprise software (though of course CS research does have practical applications; and of course there is overlap between theoretical and practical computing).
A lot of cognitive dissonance comes from people who look at CS thinking it's what they need in order to write software.
That may be true for programming language designers, but I'm afraid you misunderstand what CS is all about. Hint: it's not about time-to-market. The job of CS is to explore the theory -- precisely how to do something in interesting/elegant/expressive ways. Its job is to explore the theoretical and practical underpinnings of computing; to provide proofs; to explore the abstract and formal systems behind software. CS is not necessarily directly applicable to enterprise software (though of course CS research does have practical applications; and of course there is overlap between theoretical and practical computing).
A lot of cognitive dissonance comes from people who look at CS thinking it's what they need in order to write software.