By now you should know, I do research stuff. Mostly my research is about networking protocols, that's why I develop for ns-3.
Now, the amount of people claiming (or thinking) to be a good researcher in this field, and to be terrible at programming (in any language) is impressive. Nothing wrong, you'd say... maybe, or maybe not.
The main problem is: if you're unable to think about the implementation, you'll do mistakes in designing. Simple as that.
The example comes from a paper I've read a few days ago. Some smart guys devised a fantastic method to implement an extremely efficient routing protocol. Fantastic results. Impressive, for real. BUT... but the proposed thing could not be implemented. They forgot that data have to be known before being used. And to know data, you have to transmit them, with the usual delays, loss probability and so on.
Example: "Let's assume that node A wants to transit something to node B. Node A knows the number of packets being received by node B". Good, Node A can NOT know that number. Not without asking Node B, which, in turn, make it pointless the assumption (because the two nodes are already communicating).
What's this? Poor understanding of how things works. Mind that the authors of that paper also did some simulations proving that their method was superior to the literature ones.
How they did those simulations? Magic? No. Many simulators allow you to do "tricks". If you don't develop the code in the right way, you can actually gain infinite omniscience in your nodes, and have a lot of (wrong) data. Good job.
Learn to program, and don't take shortcuts. Protocols are painful sometimes, but developing them forces you to think about how real systems work.
Now, the amount of people claiming (or thinking) to be a good researcher in this field, and to be terrible at programming (in any language) is impressive. Nothing wrong, you'd say... maybe, or maybe not.
The main problem is: if you're unable to think about the implementation, you'll do mistakes in designing. Simple as that.
The example comes from a paper I've read a few days ago. Some smart guys devised a fantastic method to implement an extremely efficient routing protocol. Fantastic results. Impressive, for real. BUT... but the proposed thing could not be implemented. They forgot that data have to be known before being used. And to know data, you have to transmit them, with the usual delays, loss probability and so on.
Example: "Let's assume that node A wants to transit something to node B. Node A knows the number of packets being received by node B". Good, Node A can NOT know that number. Not without asking Node B, which, in turn, make it pointless the assumption (because the two nodes are already communicating).
What's this? Poor understanding of how things works. Mind that the authors of that paper also did some simulations proving that their method was superior to the literature ones.
How they did those simulations? Magic? No. Many simulators allow you to do "tricks". If you don't develop the code in the right way, you can actually gain infinite omniscience in your nodes, and have a lot of (wrong) data. Good job.
Learn to program, and don't take shortcuts. Protocols are painful sometimes, but developing them forces you to think about how real systems work.
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