I gave the prof's remark of "academic
suicide" as an example of a significant
attitude in computer science. I didn't
claim that the remark was correct, and
your examples show that the remark was not
correct.
But the more likely explanation for the
professor's reaction was not your (1) --
(3) but just that prof's strong belief
that doing anything in programming
language design would be "academic
suicide". Again, I didn't claim that the
prof's attitude was correct, but it WAS
his attitude.
The date of his remark was about 1974, and
I was suggesting improvements in PL/I (or
similar languages) that I'd been using for
about 4 years, for US Navy sonar work,
scheduling the fleet at FedEx, etc.
I would guess that the prof's view was
that academic research for programming
languages in practice was over with --
e.g., LISP, APL, Algol 68, and PL/I were
all implemented by 1974.
So, your examples and more show that the
prof was wrong: Long after 1974 others in
academic computer science did work in
programming languages without academic
death via suicide or otherwise.
Sooo, in 1974, views of the academic
research content of programming language
design varied -- such differences of
opinion are common, i.e., make horse
races.
But that encounter in 1974 was just one
example. In the 1990s I had another one
from a prof in a top level computer
science department. Gee, at the time the
President of that prof's university was
one of my Ph.D. dissertation advisors, and
I could have warned the prof that he was
trying to paddle upstream against the
relatively practical orientation of his
university president!
Also, with some irony, in the 1980s and
1990s, I was in the group at IBM's Watson
lab that designed and implemented the
artificial intelligence rule-based
language YES/L1. We published several
papers in computer science conferences.
Moreover, beyond just language design, I
was our lead on our joint work with GM
Research, the person writing our paper,
and one of our two presenters of our paper
at the AAAI (American Association for
Artificial Intelligence) IAAI (Innovative
Applications of Artificial Intelligence)
at Stanford; so the work, design,
implementation, and application of YES/L1,
was regarded as worthy of publication in
academics. Indeed, MIT published a book
with papers from the conference, and our
paper was one of the ones published.
So, with my work, now both of us have
shown that the comments of those two
professors I mentioned were not correct.
Still, it remains, with my two examples
from professors, there long has been an
attitude and belief that work in
programming languages is not sufficiently
"fundamental" to be in computer science
and would be "academic suicide". That has
been a common attitude; now both of us
have shown that the attitude was not
correct, but it remains that that attitude
has long existed -- that was my claim,
that there was such an attitude. I didn't
claim that the attitude was universal or
correct.
Given that the attitude has been in
academic computer science, no doubt the
work -- both research and teaching -- of
academic computer science departments has
been affected. In particular, students
who are eager to get high proficiency in
using programming languages, and, maybe,
writing compilers, can find, sadly, that
their department is not much interested.
I have a third example of academic
computer science demeaning programming
languages: When I was prof in a Big 10
B-school and MBA program, I'd quickly
upset the apple cart of the campus CIO
(soon I served on a committee to pick
another CIO) and been named the Chair of
the Computer Committee of the B-school.
And I'd given a grad course in computer
selection and management. We were
considering what our B-school might do in
research and teaching in computing and had
a site visit of computer science profs
from some other Big 10 universities.
At one of our meetings with the site visit
committee, one of the visitors asked me
what programming I'd done and in what
languages. So, I mentioned some of my 15
years or so of work with a variety of
applications with a variety of common
languages. Right away his reaction was
that from that experience with programming
my "brain was ruined for computer
science". Again, I'm not saying he was
correct! So here is my third example of
some academic computer science hostility
to programming languages!
This hostility seems to be a special case
of a larger, common pattern in parts of
academics: Some graduate students and
non-tenured faculty live under continual
yellow rain from leaks from higher up
latrines.
The situation is harmful for all
productive purposes for all concerned.
E.g., as a grad student, I got the best in
our class on four of the five Ph.D.
qualifying exams and in the fifth topic
already, from independent work, had a
first manuscript of my Ph.D. dissertation,
but the yellow rain continued. It wasn't
just me: Junior faculty were falling like
soldiers at Gettysburg.
By accident I found a solution, a water
tight hazmat suit and a stainless steel
umbrella: A course in optimization had
gotten fairly deep into the Kuhn-Tucker
conditions. I saw a question, saw no
answers in the likely literature, and
asked for a "reading course" to address
the question. I had a rough idea how to
proceed, and the course was approved. I
looked around for existing tools for a
solution, found none, so just pursued what
I had in mind. Two weeks later I had a
nice solution, written up, submitted, and
accepted. So, I was done with the
"reading course" in two weeks. Part of my
solution was a surprising, curious theorem
-- with the set of real numbers R, a
positive integer n, R^n with the usual
topology, and a set C a subset of R^n, set
C is closed if and only if it is the level
set of an infinitely differentiable
function f: R^n --> R. My work in
constraint qualifications also answered a
question stated but not answered in the
famous paper in mathematical economics by
Arrow, Hurwicz, and Uzawa. Yes, I found
it easy to publish the paper.
When I submitted my work at the end of the
two weeks, word spread quickly in the
department. The prof I regarded as the
best gave me congrats in the hall. Result
-- the hazmat suit and umbrella. For the
rest of my time through my Ph.D., no more
yellow rain.
My Ph.D. was in applied math and not
computer science.
It appears that it there is a wide range
of topics in computer science and for most
of the topics there are profs who regard
the topic as good and profs who regard the
topic as junk.
The critical stuff of the yellow rain can
cause stress, clinical depression, and
suicide -- that's what happened to my
wife, sweet old-fashioned girl, won prizes
in cooking, sewing, raising chickens,
Valedictorian, Summa Cum Laude, PBK,
Woodrow Wilson and NSF Fellowships, and
Ph.D.
I do not now, nor have ever had, any
interest in being a college prof or
publishing papers. I regard such a career
as financially irresponsible. My
interests are in business, the
money-making kind, and there I regard
math, existing and/or original, and
computing as the main tools. I went to
grad school to learn more about the math
tools. I was a college prof for a while
as part of taking care of my suffering
wife.