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Comment by pharmakom | Hacker News Reader

Maybe they are not as useful as we thought?

Honestly, my experience is that developers are, on the whole, incredibly conservative about changing their ways. When I was still an active Java dev, I would, along with a couple of other peers, solve a lot of problems in one of our codebase with the YourKit profiler, but the use never spread - people would prefer to grind out the thing they already know and thrash around blindly to spending a day or two learning an easier way of solving a problem.

Granted, if I had a nickle for every profiling tool that claimed to make code easier, more secure, faster, etc which didn't live up to its promises, I wouldn't need to work anymore.

It's great that you found one that worked in your particular situation, but my exerpience has been quite the opposite. And it's not from a lack of being forced to try.

or the academic people are not interested in putting in the effort to maintain the tool in order to get more adoption.

We aren't incentivized to maintain research prototypes. On the flip side, industry seems to have very little interest in adopting our findings into products.

> We aren't incentivized to maintain research prototypes

There are still examples where research prototypes have evolved into successful products, either as open source projects or commercial companies. The researcher needs to be passionate enough about getting adoption and real-world impact in order for this to work.

> On the flip side, industry seems to have very little interest in adopting our findings into products.

IMO, developer tools need to be wayyyy better to overcome inertia. This statement might not hold in other fields, e.g., ML/AI.

Any manager worth their salt would invest in a tool for 4x productivity. Facebook and Google spend a fortune on internal tooling. And yet these tools are forgotten. That’s why I’m suspicious of the reported gains.

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