It's definitely interesting, but I've seen way too many papers that never actually release something useful.
The primary goal of academic research isn't to build a production-quality product. The hope is that in 5, 10, maybe even 20 years, entrepreneurs will comb through the good ideas from academic papers and get the inspiration to build real usable marketable products from them.
Edit: One example that comes to mind is all these JITs that are being built for dynamic languages like Python (Unladen Swallow), Ruby (Rubinius), and JavaScript (Tracemonkey). They all were heavily inspired by research done in the mid-90's on JITs for the Self language, which nobody in the real world actually used :)
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 12.9 ms ] threadIt's definitely interesting, but I've seen way too many papers that never actually release something useful.
The primary goal of academic research isn't to build a production-quality product. The hope is that in 5, 10, maybe even 20 years, entrepreneurs will comb through the good ideas from academic papers and get the inspiration to build real usable marketable products from them.
Edit: One example that comes to mind is all these JITs that are being built for dynamic languages like Python (Unladen Swallow), Ruby (Rubinius), and JavaScript (Tracemonkey). They all were heavily inspired by research done in the mid-90's on JITs for the Self language, which nobody in the real world actually used :)