The best thing Julia Lawall ever did!

Not the hardest, not the thing with the most sophisticated theories behind it, not the thing that helped her academic career the most... but definitely the best and the most useful.

There must be a lot of other academics who could do things that are less theoretical but more useful than what they normally do.

There must be a lot of undervalued academics who in effect are punished for doing things that useful without requiring quite as much deep theory as their fields can muster.

I'm glad she did something that she wasn't really rewarded for and I'm sad that the academic reward functions are so off.