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7 Fast and Patriotic Nineteen years after its first version was developed, Lua is a fairly popular language, used in a number of well-known software products, both commercial and open source, with the number growing every day. The work on spillover effects in innovation may lead us to think that Lua’s success would present an important opportunity for local economic development: local companies could take advantage of their proximity to PUC-Rio to gain better understanding of the language and its future directions, finding better use for Lua in their products and engaging in related innovation. This is not the case. At the time I was doing my fieldwork in 2007, Lua was largely unused in Brazil. Apart from Tecgraf, Nas Nuvens, and two other small companies incubated at PUC, Roberto Ierusalimschy knew of no Brazilian companies using Lua. If local companies were using Lua, they were not advertising this fact. Roberto remembered only a few occasions when local companies had entered into contact with the Lua team, none of which led to any extended collaboration. In my five months in Rio that year, I managed to find just one more company using Lua in Rio de Janeiro, bringing the total to five. By the end of 2008, three of those five companies were either moving away from Lua or had abandoned it altogether. The situation has been promising to change in recent years due to Lua’s growing visibility abroad and its inclusion in the Brazilian standard for digital television, yet the language has yet to gain wide use in Brazil. There are several reasons for this lack of local adoption. Some of my interviewees pointed, sometimes with much frustration, to the Lua team’s seeming lack of interest in expanding Lua’s use in Brazil. In fact, while Lua’s authors mention in one of their articles being “bothered” by Lua’s remaining relatively unknown in Brazil despite its growing use abroad (Ierusalimschy , Figueiredo, and Celes 2007, 2-9), I could see few signs of real efforts toward helping local adoption. At the time of my fieldwork in 2007, for example, Lua had no Portuguese documentation—an issue that did not 160 Chapter 7 seem to cause much concern for the team. A closely related reason is the seeming lack of fit between what Lua offers and the typical needs of the local industry. Lua provides clear value for two kinds of software projects: desktop software with high performance requirements (e.g., games) and small devices that cannot run the more popular programming languages. Both kinds of projects typically involve making products. Rio’s software industry, however, focuses almost entirely on services to local organizations , which typically involves building web-based systems. Lua offers few obvious advantages in this domain. This lack of fit, however, can be seen as a symptom rather than a cause of the disconnect between Lua and the local industry. As we saw in the previous chapter, Lua’s authors gradually adapted the language to the needs of foreign industry largely because of their lack of strong ties to the local industry. Lua’s disconnection from the local industry exemplifies a more general pattern of lack of ties between industry and academic research in Brazil, an issue often noted by my interviewees. There may be several reasons for such lack of ties. The main proximate reason is the government policy. Brazil’s government funds academic research in accordance with the perceived academic success of each department and university. Such success is evaluated quantitatively and involves as an important component a metric of “intellectual production,” measured by the number of publications . The publications are weighed by a rating that is assigned to each journal and conference by a government agency responsible for postgraduate education.1 The rating goes from “A1” to “A2,” then from “B1” to “B5,” and finally to “C.” Publications in journals and conferences rated “C” are normally given zero weight. The rating is based on each journal’s position in citation databases such as Thompson Reuters’s JCR, which primarily index English publications. Consequently, for computer science, Brazilian journals and conferences must usually include articles in English to get a rating above “C.” Only those that publish articles exclusively in English get to “B2.” None are rated “B1” or higher (CAPES 2009, 2011). Brazilian computer science researchers thus have good reasons to publish in “international ” journals and conferences, which usually means those based in the United States. This in turn...

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