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Comment by artemonster | Hacker News Reader

very hot and edgy take: theoretical CS is vastly overrated and useless. as someone who actively studied the field, worked on contemporary CPU archs and still doing some casual PL research - asides from VERY FEW instances from theoretical CS about graphs/algos there is little to zero impact on our practical developments in the overall field since 80s. all modern day Dijkstras produce slop research about waving dynamic context into java program by converting funds into garbage papers. more deep CS research is totally lost in some type gibberish or nonsense formalisms. IMO research and science overall is in a deep crisis and I can clearly see it from CS perspective

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Well, I think there is something to it. Computers were at some point newly invented so research in algorithms suddenly became much more applicable. This opened up a gold mine of research opportunities. But like real life mines at some point they get depleted and then the research becomes much less interesting unless you happen to be interested in niche topics. But, of course, the paper mill needs to keep running and so does the production of PhDs.

> theoretical CS is vastly overrated and useless

> as someone who actively studied the field,

Does not compute.

Your comment is mere empty verbiage with no information.

Your critique is valid, but I am not in a mood to prove myself to anons on the internet :)

I am not the "anon" here; you are.

You made a preposterous statement, got called out, and are now making excuses.

Anybody who claims to have studied "Theoretical Computer Science" can/will never make the statements that you did (and that too in a thread to do with Niklaus Wirth's achievements who was one of the most "practical" of "theoretical computer scientists"!).

Here is wikipedia for edification - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_computer_science and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science

"I come to talk low-effort shit, not to think or inform". Par for the course, I suppose.

I assume that you are talking about modern "theoretical CS", because among the "theoretical CS" papers from the fifties, sixties, seventies, and even some that are more recent I have found a lot that remain very valuable and I have seen a lot of modern programmers who either make avoidable mistakes or they implement very suboptimal solutions, just because they are no longer aware of ancient research results that were well known in the past.

I especially hate those who attempt to design new programming languages today, but then demonstrate a complete lack of awareness about the history of programming languages, by introducing a lot of design errors in their languages, which had been discussed decades ago and for which good solutions had been found at that time, but those solutions were implemented in languages that never reached the popularity of C and its descendants, so only few know about them today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257461

Indeed, we don't really need affine type systems, what use could we get for them in the industry. /s

If you really have followed the research in type systems and see how it *factually* intersects with practical reality you wouldnt joke about it. Its a bizzare nonsense what they do in „research“ and sane implementations (only slightly grounded in formalisms) are actually used

I do, and hope that one day stuff like dependent types and formal proofs are every day tools, alongside our AI masters, which also don't use any learnings from scientific research.

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