Ruven,
> >I believe that the academic establishment rapidly expands to
> >fill gaps in the research ecosystem. If there was any real need
> >for the psychology of automobile body welding, someone would be
> >doing it.
>
> Let me assure that you are dead, 100% wrong. There are a great many areas that
> lack behavioral research activity in which it is badly needed. The academic
> community is that, a community, in which groups of researchers share results.
> If you went off and did research on the psychology of programming for automobile
> welding, where would you publish it?
Ergonomics? Human Factors? Journal of Applied Psychology? It's
true that you might have trouble with the referees at "Welding
International", but my suspicion is that even they would publish
eventually.
> More important, who else could understand your
> work and cite it?
Good point. Which is why small communities of discussion (too
small to have their own journal) are so important. PPIG is a
very good example. But it's also important to relate to
audiences of practitioners.
> More important, I don't think one can draw a clear line between programming
>knowledge,
> software engineering knowledge and "application" knowledge. All of these things are
>involved
> in writing a successful program.
That's true. But you can't draw a clear line between any two
things in the universe, can you? It seems to me that the optimum
size of an academic discipline is <somewhat smaller than the
range of things an individual is able to acquire schemas for>.
This is just small enough that you have some space left for the
occasional interdisciplinary collaboration. But if you really
threw up your hands saying "It's all connected", you'd never
achieve anything.
What you are really talking about with "programming",
"engineering" and "application" knowledge is the old, old
question of acquiring a craft. Any craftsperson must understand
a) their tools, b) the needs of their customer, and c) the
professional procedures for meeting those needs. Why is software
so different? Craftspeople have no trouble talking about the
design of good tools separately from the other aspects of their
daily work. Of course they know it's all related, but they can
work on one thing at a time when they need to.
Alan
--
Alan Blackwell Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/afb21/ Phone: +44 (0) 1223 334418
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