The Shape of Code

Academics often moan about industry not making use of their work (or at least they do within the code analysis niche I frequent, I have no real knowledge of other niches). There are three reasons for this state of affairs:

1. The work that most academics do has no practical relevance to industry. This is the lion’s share of the reason and something that many academics will agree with if none of their colleges are likely to overhear them. I suspect many academics are not too fussed that their work is not used by industry and are happy to continue working on things they find interesting (or that they can write papers about that disconnected souls are happy to see published).
2. Very very few people in the software industry ever read academic papers. But hey, not reading manuals is regarded as a badge of honour. Some people do read manuals and are quickly elevated to expert status. Academic papers do have a very low signal to noise ratio and learning to speed read them to locate the gold nuggets takes practice.
3. If an academic’s work is applied by some company the last thing those involved will do is say anything about it. Industry is a cut-throat place and what is to be gained by freely giving useful information to the competition?

   The second product my company ever produced was a range of code generators for an intermediate code that was currently interpreted; how best to match the patterns in the intermediate code and also reuse as much as possible for the different cpu targets? I found a solution in Mahadevan Ganapahi’s PhD thesis and now 33 years after publishing it he gets some credit for a long gone industrial application.