Research
The other impediment to software engineering research
In the decades since structured programming, many of the advances in software engineering have come out of non-university sources, mostly of four kinds: Start-up technology companies (who played a large role, for example, in the development of object technology). Industrial research labs, starting with Xerox PARC and Bell Labs. Independent (non-university-based) author-consultants. Independent programmer-innovators, who start open-source communities … Read more
One cheer for incremental research
[Note: an updated version of this article (June 2011) appears in the Communications of the ACM blog.] The world of research funding, always a little strange, has of late been prey to a new craze: paradigm-shift mania. We will only fund twenty curly-haired cranky-sounding visionaries in the hope that one of them will invent relativity. The rest of … Read more