Comment by mathisfun123
6 days ago
You're wrong but for the right reasons: all of academic software pedagogy is about "abstractions" because academics do not work for a living (they teach). That's why whenever I hear anyone use the word abstraction I bucket them under roughly the same category (people who write software that does not matter). Think about it: if you can afford to not care about cache misses or latencies or memory hierarchies or any of the other physical details which are extremely specific (the opposite of abstract) then you are writing code that has no constraints. no scale, no externalities.
Almost everything you use came from academics and research labs.
lol you joking? point to a single piece of software on your computer that is maintained by academics/researchers ("came from" means absolutely nothing - this isn't a discussion about royalties or credit).
Weasely moving the goalposts. If we were stuck with mere "maintaining", you'd still be using the most primitive CPU and OS. Besides, once something is invented and shaped and studied, even a monkey can maintain it.
The point is the things that you get to use, and tech industry gets to maintain, come from research in the academic fields, in corporate R&D research labs from people with PhDs and everything (from Xerox's to Googles and Anthropics), and of course from direct parterships with universities as well.
Not as in "they created that in 1976", as in: the past, the current, and the next things you'll use, will come from that too. This includes anything from Algol, Lisp and OO and TeX to Monads, and Futures, and Prototype inheritance, and NNs and LLMs.
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You use abstractions every day. Interfaces are abstractions. Perhaps you are simply being flippant, or rather abstract with your words.
i have no idea what that has to do with anything - i use a toilet every day as well.
Fine and dandy, but 40x faster trumps all algorithmic theories. You need to teach and implement cache-oblivious algos.
I think you misunderstood me - I agree with you. I'm pointing out that academics are incapable of that.