Unsustainable tool enhancement is a barrier to progress [013N]
I am going to say something strange, and I hope that I will not be misunderstood.
By concentrating an immense amount of funding into “developing the application” without regard for the evolving theoretical basis and sustaining the development over a timescale of decades, we can unintentionally and disastrously raise the bar for high-impact advances by increasing product inertia in unsustainable ways. For example, I would estimate that it costs upwards of £1–2M to create an excellent IDE—so when a five year program results in an excellent IDE for a specific language along the understandably narrow mission of an FRO, the funders may have unintentionally raised the financial baseline for any future transformative impact by at least £1M.
We do not need to make any guesses or conjectures as to whether increased inertia is a likely outcome of these new funding models—as this has already occurred, incontrovertibly, as a consequence of the existing industrial-adoption-based model of production of programming languages, where a large corporation can put millions of funding into a language of relatively low quality (and thus raise significantly the usability of the tooling) to the point that making a competently designed language meet the minimum standard for adoption would cost far more than is possible to fund on the academic model.
Obviously the solution to this problem is not to slow the march of tool enhancement—quite the opposite. But we must find a way to achieve these enhancements without making future improvements of a more radical nature prohibitively expensive. I think that the key to unlocking the long-term sustainability of intellectual tool enhancement to develop a unified and responsive theory/practice funding model that can exercise leadership on the scale of decades.