TITLE: Weekend Shorts
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 10, 2019 10:53 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 Andy Ko, in
<A HREF="https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/sigcse-2019-trip-report-celebrating-50-years-b3460835a09a">
   SIGCSE 2019 report</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 I always have to warn my students before they attend SIGCSE that
 it's not a place for deep and nuanced discussions about learning,
 nor is it a place to get critical feedback about their ideas.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 It is, however, a wonderful place to be immersed in the concerns
 of CS teachers and their perceptions of evidence. 
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 I'm not sure I agree that one can't have deep, nuanced discussions
 about learning at SIGCSE, but it certainly is not a research
 conference.  It is a great place to talk to and learn from people
 in the trenches teaching CS courses, with a strong emphasis on the
 early courses.  I have picked up a lot of effective, creative, and
 inspiring ideas at SIGCSE over the years.  Putting them onto sure
 scientific footing is part of my job when I get back.

~~~~~

 Stephen Kell, in
<A HREF="https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/srk21/research/papers/kell17some-preprint.pdf">
   Some Were Meant for C</A>
 (PDF), an Onward! 2017 essay:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Unless we can understand the real reasons why programmers
 continue to use C, we risk researchers continuing to solve
 a set of problems that is incomplete and/or irrelevant, while
 practitioners continue to use flawed tools.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

For example,

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 ... "faster safe languages" is seen as the Important Research
 Problem, not better integration.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 ... whereas Kell believes that C's superiority in the realm of
 integration is one of the main reasons that C remains a
 dominant, essential systems language.

 Even with the freedom granted by tenure, academic culture tends
 to restrict what research gets done.  One cause is a desire to
 publish in the best venues, which encourages work that is valued
 by certain communities.  Another reason is that academic research
 tends to attract people who are interested in a certain kind of
 clean problem.  CS isn't exactly "round, spherical chickens in a
 vacuum" territory, but...  Language support for system integration,
 interop, and migration can seem like a grungier sort of work than
 most researchers envisioned when they went to grad school.

 "Some Were Meant for C" is an elegant paper, just the sort of work,
 I imagine, that Richard Gabriel had when envisioned the essays
 track at Onward.  Well worth a read.
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