[jrockway]

I see you created a brand new account just to write this post.

MapReduce is the name of a piece of software, not simply the concept of map followed by reduce. That's something that every high school freshman invents on his own in Algebra 1 class. The interesting research area is making that concept scale to "run this command on every web page on the Internet" billions of times a day. I don't know about you, but I don't see anything to do that in my apt repositories.

Research at Google isn't about solving problems that are beyond the comprehension or reach of any average practitioner of programming. A good example is Street View. Anyone can understand strapping some cameras and sensors to a car and driving it around to make pictures of places available on the Internet. It's hard to call that "state of the art research" because it's such a simple idea, but before Google did the research, the product didn't exist. Now you can see almost any street address anywhere in the world in your browser. (The hard part is in the details. How do you map images to locations on the Earth in areas where GPS reception isn't good enough to provide enough accuracy? Scaling something to the entire Earth is not easy.)

That many programmers, who have standards that consistently hover around varying levels of mediocrity

How exactly did you come to this conclusion?

[fa_il]

Right. I would say it's more about execution. For that Google gets full credit. And I do find the execution impressive.

The mediocrity line is my opinion. Not necessarily fact. Downvote me if you are offended.

Better yet, prove me wrong.

[jrockway]

Better yet, prove me wrong.

First you say, all programmers at Google have standards that "hover around mediocrity". Then you say you're amazed at Google's execution on world-changing ideas. Do you see a contradiction?

Argument over, you can close your trolling account! :)

[fa_il]

Can you show me where I said:

"all programmers at Google"

"amazed"

"world-changing ideas"

What I see are your words, not mine. Yet they are attributed to me.

If this is an "argument" as you suggest, then you are doing a poor job at making your case.

There is a difference between 1. "research" and developing "novel" ideas and 2. executing well on large projects. It's possible to accomplish 2. without invoking 1., and vice versa.

There is no contradiction.

When a programmer complains there's nothing in "apt" to solve his problem, I'm never impressed. Nor am I ever surprised. Convenience makes some programmers very lazy.

[jrockway]

Isn't there a bridge you should be guarding?