> there was way too much academic interest in language concepts and way too little practical interest in doing work.
They are communicating something real, but perhaps misattributing the root cause.
The purely abstract ‘ideal’ form of software development is unconstrained by business requirements. In this abstraction, perfect software would be created to purely express an idea. Academia allows for this, and to a lesser extent some open source projects.
In the real world, the creation of software must always be subordinate to the goals of the business. The goals are the purpose, and the software is the means.
Languages that are academically interesting, unsurprisingly, attract a greater preponderance of academically minded individuals. Of these, only a percentage have the desire or ability to let go of the pure abstract, and instead focus on the business domain. So it inevitably creates a management challenge; not an insurmountable one, but a challenge.
Hence the simplified ‘these people won’t do the work!’.
When people say things like:
> there was way too much academic interest in language concepts and way too little practical interest in doing work.
They are communicating something real, but perhaps misattributing the root cause.
The purely abstract ‘ideal’ form of software development is unconstrained by business requirements. In this abstraction, perfect software would be created to purely express an idea. Academia allows for this, and to a lesser extent some open source projects.
In the real world, the creation of software must always be subordinate to the goals of the business. The goals are the purpose, and the software is the means.
Languages that are academically interesting, unsurprisingly, attract a greater preponderance of academically minded individuals. Of these, only a percentage have the desire or ability to let go of the pure abstract, and instead focus on the business domain. So it inevitably creates a management challenge; not an insurmountable one, but a challenge.
Hence the simplified ‘these people won’t do the work!’.
Yes, exactly this. I don’t feel that I misattributed anything, but if I had to expound on the idea this is exactly how I would explain it.