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31 Jan
2003
31 Jan
'03
6:55 a.m.
[Tim]
These kinds of things get done by legions of grad students in search of a thesis ...
[Samuele Pedroni]
in which case then typically portability, long term maintainability and absence of rough edges are quite irrelevant.
At first, yes, but it's not irrelevant that *something* gets done. For example, countless now-defunct Lisp companies were based on the founder(s)'s grad work, and a huge (relative to the size of the community) amount of Lisp compiler knowledge is still available for the grabbing. Even if you don't look at a lick of that code, the heritage of published papers is priceless. Or worthless, to judge from how often it's referenced <0.1 wink>.