Part of the problem is that it's really hard to quantify the social value of failure. So, a lot of people opt to take the easy path and do more busy work. At least, then they may show that their busy work had some productivity and output.
I see this all too often in software development. Instead of people chasing wildly challenging ideas, they choose to re-write things over and over. How many programming languages do we really need? How many ORMs and MVC frameworks? How many template engines? Do we really need to port all of those libraries to yet another platform?
It seems its socially more acceptable to chase the incremental improvements (or illusory improvements) than to chase those things that have high risk of failure.
Let's say you're a musician. Would you rather spend your life working on a entirely new genre of music that ends up never catching on? Or, would you rather pursue the path of getting signed to a major label by churning out rehashes of previous hits? At least the second path gives some opportunity to pay the bills while still doing something that resembles what you love.
As a society we need a better way of 'paying' people to explore, experiment and invent. We need better ways to capture the multitudes of failures and re-incorporate them. I think this used to be the realm of the academic, but it seems that the academic institution has now become just a hand of the corporate machine.
What counts as a wildly challenging idea in applied computer science? A new programming paradigm? I actually can't think of anything I would drop everything to pursue right now, and I suspect most people are the same way. I think it's naive to assume everyone would do something wonderful if only they were unfettered by corporate shackles. For most people writing a good ORM or programming language would be an achievement.
I could probably make a list of things, but they'd be specific to my particular needs. Generally, each week, I think of one or two services or products that I wish I had.
At this very moment, I wish I had a service that would crawl the web and extract recipes and save them in a standard format with standardized ingredients, units of measure, equipment, and procedures. But, that's just me.
> How many programming languages do we really need?
Considering how bad some of the current ones are, more. For example, a lot of current software is written in C++, which is a bloated mess. IMHO, we need a new systems language like Go or Rust.
I see this all too often in software development. Instead of people chasing wildly challenging ideas, they choose to re-write things over and over. How many programming languages do we really need? How many ORMs and MVC frameworks? How many template engines? Do we really need to port all of those libraries to yet another platform?
It seems its socially more acceptable to chase the incremental improvements (or illusory improvements) than to chase those things that have high risk of failure.
Let's say you're a musician. Would you rather spend your life working on a entirely new genre of music that ends up never catching on? Or, would you rather pursue the path of getting signed to a major label by churning out rehashes of previous hits? At least the second path gives some opportunity to pay the bills while still doing something that resembles what you love.
As a society we need a better way of 'paying' people to explore, experiment and invent. We need better ways to capture the multitudes of failures and re-incorporate them. I think this used to be the realm of the academic, but it seems that the academic institution has now become just a hand of the corporate machine.