Academics should stick to pure computer science

Every time the academics try to wet their flaccid noodle in the soft, warm crevices of actual programming, they prematurely squirt all over it, and don't get any of their gooey information inside. I'm coming at this from the context of compilers, but I'm sure it applies to most areas. I don't think that anyone could disagree that tomes such as TAoCP are anything less than holy scripture and should be read by anyone who thinks to call them-self a programmer, but beyond that, it's done nothing but waste time. For instance, pure functional programming. Like most academic things, it promises beauty and simplicity and millions of optimizations that can be done. Where are these optimizations? In the math of course. Problem is, most of them never bother to implement them, and on the rare occasion that they do, it's some toy that only shows that particular optimization on a particular instance on a particular program.

The damage comes in when legions of pseudo-intellectuals argue for the style used on the basis that it can merely be shown to allow these optimizations. The rate at which such things actually occur are probably less than one or two percent. Besides looking particularly ``mathy'' in syntax, the result is usually purposeless and never delivers one any of the promises that were theoretically possible.

It was the same thing when Object-Oriented Programming™ reared its ugly head.

You can do OO style in pretty much any language, and it can help to organize some portions of your code and allow you to tackle larger or more complex problems than before. But lock your entire language into a bad interpretation of OO, and you get shit like Java.

Likewise, you can do FP in any programming language, and it can clean the hell out of some of your data flows and data access issues, and even make it run faster because sometimes just copying the damned data is faster than trying to juggle mutations safely. But if you get your head too far up FP's ass to the point where that's all you see, you get fucked up mentally.