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.

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.

Sorry, but applying an old concept to a new problem (actually just new buzzwords... it's only the size of the problem that's new) does not make a "novel" solution. Moreover, it's an obvious solution. But I guess that depends on who is doing the programming.

I would love to see how programmers with large clusters at their disposal were approaching large datasets before the moment they realized splitting the task into smaller pieces was what they should do.

The thing is that "MapReduce" is a concept that was in practice, e.g. by LISP programmers, long, long before Google rediscovered it.

Much like Google's many acquisitions that the public perceives as resulting from "Google R&D", things like map-reduce are also viewed as coming from "unparalleled Google capabilities".

Let's get real. Google is a big company that employs thousands upon thousands of overqualified Java and C++ programmers. They are a fat cat. Not necessarily a cunning and agile one.

With the amount of cash they have on hand, indeed they should be producing some interesting research.

But I have a hard time seeing things like map-reduce as state-of-the-art R&D.

That many programmers, who have standards that consistently hover around varying levels of mediocrity, are satisfied with Google's design choices does not necessarily make what they do "state of the art". It just makes it the most popular. (Popularity is of course very important, perhaps all-important, in this business, but has little to do with research and pushing the envelope.)