I don't agree with the author. For me each of the sins have their goal that isn't in what they state. I wonder what the author thinks of this almost 25 years later. ----- * The grandmothering: Too often have I read an abstract, not understood it (since an abstract is allowed to be dense), and quit on these first lines orienting the paper in the field . If it's your field these lines don't cost, if you're a newcomer,…
You raise good points, but I'm largely with the author. * grandmothering: The author's examples weren't actually about orienting the paper in the field. They were giving redundant background material on the field itself. I think the distinction was not made clear. If I were to speak for the author, I'd say that it's not about dropping these introductory sentences, it's about making them say something useful to somebo…
They were about orienting the field in the world. Distributed computing could (unlikely) have other meanings ('a laptop for every child?'). Redundant for you or me is not redundant to everybody.
> Telling me that distributed computing deals with scalable problems is not.
Yet distributed computing is a highly specific construct and scalable is a regular English word. Imagine a biology PhD-student whose advisor tells him to read this paper to improve his code.
> toc
But it isn't to find your way around. It's to tell what's in store and what can be skipped. Also, I have never seen a toc that was bragging. They are dry because they are scripted.
'First we propose a novel algorithm': I should definitely read this carefully and not just check if it's still the same as before. 'Next we prove it is brilliant': (Leaving aside this won't every get published) Correctness proofs are important, but today I don't care, skip. 'Later we show ...' (Now your argument is just breaking down.) But apparently there is no time complexity in this paper and there are no experiments. I really needed a practical paper. Lets just leaf through and check the images to see if there is experimental data.
> Conclusion
True it's not about what you did. But everybody knows the conclusion is read without the paper and even without the introduction. You must to say what you did as context before saying why others should care. Which is what I meant with my previous comment, only two fifths of the conclusion is summarizing. And you can't just leave those two sentences out.
And future work, if done well, should not be new information if you've read the paper. All of it should be things that follow naturally from things which were unaddressed. Finally, the wider meaning is also not new (hard) information.