[jorgeortiz85]

    Over the past year, even in the little time we've had to
    work on the paper, we've learned a lot more about parsing
    with derivatives.

    In the week after the community found it, you all taught
    us ten times more than that. Thank you!

Why isn't all computer science research done like this?

[mattmight]

/article author

In short, there is a paranoid mentality in academia that if people let their ideas go before formal publication, they'll be "scooped."

I'll admit to falling prey to that mentality too.

This experiment has made me rethink a lot of my assumptions.

I'd say that, in general, most papers wouldn't elicit a community response like this.

I think the fact that this paper was on parsing, a topic accessible and important to many, helped fuel the interest.

I bet if I arXived the rest of my rejected papers (all on static analysis of dynamic languages), there wouldn't be much of a commotion.

But, I'm intrigued enough to give it another shot. I'll write a blog post about another rejected paper in the near future, release the draft on arXiv, post the reviews and see what happens.

If it happens again, maybe "naked science" is a realistic proposition.

[billswift]

>In short, there is a paranoid mentality in academia that if people let their ideas go before formal publication, they'll be "scooped."

That is because academia is mainly about status seeking (see Robin Hanson's many posts on Overcoming Bias, http://www.overcomingbias.com/), which is inherently a zero-sum game.

ADDED: That is about academia as a social institution, it is not intended to be an attack on all academics all the time, though any successful academic does have to accommodate to it.

[knowtheory]

You also picked a pretty troll worthy title as well (irrespective of content).

We could build a drudge report for CS, but i some how don't think that'd be useful to the community :)

(i found the paper interesting and useful though! reading through the scala has been instructive)

[mattmight]

Too true about the troll-worthy title! I'm sure that helped.

We never got around to picking a more "academic" title, so we put it on arXiv under the working title.