On 20 December 2010 22:38, Ross Kendle <[email protected]> wrote: > > I value the opportunity to engage with the members of the VPRI team through > this list.
And how much engagement do you get? Not a lot, if you look at the number of posts by VPRI members to this list, though what little does come through is valuable. > I have no "right" There's that word again. I didn't mention rights, not least because I am not... > a US tax payer, but if I were, I'd certainly be making representations in the appropriate places: I find it bizarre and outmoded that a software project is required to produce status reports, but not code. > I am however grateful the NSF funds this project. i.e. the US taxpayer. And US taxpayers may well be interested in how their money is spent, though I agree that their first port of call would seem to be to lobby the funding body, not the project itself. I have no such claim, not being a US taxpayer, hence my appeal to the project's own self-interest. > I am in no position to guide or cajole VPRI. I didn't create Smalltalk, ... > or any of the myriad of technologies or approaches that have so > fundamentally shaped the environment I have grown up in. So, only famous computer scientists are in a position to discuss how best to run software research projects? Smalltalk is a great example: so much of its promise is still unfulfilled 40 years after it was conceived, and 30 after it reached maturity. The systems that most people actually use are pale reflections of its power. It is precisely the link with Smalltalk that suggests to me that this project is likely to suffer the same fate. > The VPRI team have probably forgotten more about creating software than I >will ever know, Right, though fortunately at least most of the theory is published... > though I hope their work is helping to close the gap ;-) ...and publishing the practice too would help close it completely. > This is a great project. I wish the team every success, and the continuation > of circumstances that enable those achievements. And one of those circumstances is showing results. At the moment things look nice. I imagine some people from the funding body get nice demos. But it could be something being talked about all over the world; and here, I do mean among enthusiasts and researchers; I am not imagining that half-baked research code magically becomes useful to the mainstream simply by being published. Indeed, when I worked at Microsoft Research, the Microsoft management made clear the considerable costs of commercialising research work, explaining why researchers couldn't just "throw code over the wall" and expect it to be adopted. This is not the same situation, as I'm not expecting production or final code from the VPRI project *at any stage*. -- http://rrt.sc3d.org _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
