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Let's Not Call It "Computer Science" If We Really Mean "Computer Programming"

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Re: Let's Not Call It "Computer Science" If We Really Mean "Computer Programming"

#161

Post by baddox »

dxbydt wrote: post #118

fwiw, an opposite take, from a decade ago. at my cs pgm, the assistant professors were supposed to make a presentation on day 1 so the grad students could make an informed decision which prof to work with, which subjects to sign up for. the software engg prof was a glib, entreprenurial hotshot who said "my students have been placed at netscape, sun, microsoft, oracle". he talked about industry partnerships, internshi…

Am I reading it correctly that people in your CS program didn't know about basic algorithms until the beginning of graduate school?

Re: Let's Not Call It "Computer Science" If We Really Mean "Computer Programming"

#162

Post by strictfp »

netvarun wrote: post #145
jsprinkles wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was personally not cut out to do scut work. I had zero interest and respect for maintenance, unit tests, requirements & specs, UML modelling, refactoring, waterfall method, agile, kanban... The world in which this is "scut work" is not the world I want to live in. Let's be honest. You don't want to do practical, you'd rather do theoretical, and that's fine. However, don't disrespect practical just because it isn'…

I have to disagree with you. Software engineering 'ideas' regarding modeling and testing have gone way overboard. I have a feeling that that all those who peddle fancy buzzwords such as agile and kanban are either MBA graduates with no real engineering background or failed engineers trying to reinvent their career.

I'm a preacher of Agile. I talk about it in order to get things done. Theoretical work is important, but let's face it, most customers want products, not research. Your average person declaring himself 'theoretically oriented' is no good in delivering products. He hasn't understood the bigger goal and will just waste the clients time and money training himself to write better algos. Most likely he will be rather unexperienced, and produce pale replicas of existing library algos and data structures.

In my experience the ones who know the most theory are also often the most pragmatic and professional ones. These don't boost about their technical knowledge, but they know it and know how to apply it. These will declare themselves 'problem solving'.

One that declares himself mostly theoretical most likely just hasn't gotten that far yet. Then we have real researchers, but that's another story entirely.

Re: Let's Not Call It "Computer Science" If We Really Mean "Computer Programming"

#163

Post by UK-AL »

cantankerous wrote: post #105
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting with your ad hominem, I think you took exactly the wrong things away from this article. Regardless of his writing style, his points are dead-on: 1. Computer science doesn't teach programming (with the corollary that computer scientists specifically don't want to teach programming). 2. Most people going into computer science want to learn programming. 3. Many people get fed up with the rigors of computer scie…

I agree with the sentiment that software engineering isn't computer science, but I disagree with the sentiment that software engineering is a discipline worthy of note on the same scale that we afford to, say, electrical engineering, civil engineering, or mechanical engineering. To date, software engineering is still largely a collection of (fairly subjective and contextually-sensitive) best practices. Software Engin…

Most professions are a collection of best practice rules, accountancy for one. Yet it is not a trade.

Re: Let's Not Call It "Computer Science" If We Really Mean "Computer Programming"

#164

Post by UK-AL »

irahul wrote: post #113
mquander wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try the following thought experiment: Person A spends four years getting a BS in CS at a top-tier school, learning about programming at least for a few hours a day on average, with the benefit of a well-considered curriculum and instruction by wizards. Person B spends four years working full-time on something interesting at Google, which probably gives her more total hands-on-keyboard time, and also access to some mi…

> Person A spends four years getting a BS in CS at a top-tier school, learning about programming at least for a few hours a day on average, Real world might be different, but I don't think a CS degree should be teaching programming at least for a few hours a day . IMO that would be a total waste. There are bazillion of things to learn - database concepts, discrete maths, networks, ai&ml, digital electronics, some bas…

Often the best to prove you know these things, is program them.

Re: Let's Not Call It "Computer Science" If We Really Mean "Computer Programming"

#165

Post by jberryman »

cantankerous wrote: post #105
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting with your ad hominem, I think you took exactly the wrong things away from this article. Regardless of his writing style, his points are dead-on: 1. Computer science doesn't teach programming (with the corollary that computer scientists specifically don't want to teach programming). 2. Most people going into computer science want to learn programming. 3. Many people get fed up with the rigors of computer scie…

I agree with the sentiment that software engineering isn't computer science, but I disagree with the sentiment that software engineering is a discipline worthy of note on the same scale that we afford to, say, electrical engineering, civil engineering, or mechanical engineering. To date, software engineering is still largely a collection of (fairly subjective and contextually-sensitive) best practices. Software Engin…

> but I disagree with the sentiment that software engineering is a discipline worthy of note on the same scale that we afford to, say, electrical engineering, civil engineering, or mechanical engineering.

Exactly. Programming is not harder to learn or master than something like carpentry (i.e. something easily picked up by an interested person on their own, but with lots of potential for mastery).

What on earth would you be doing for four years of college studying programming sans compsci? What a waste.

Re: Let's Not Call It "Computer Science" If We Really Mean "Computer Programming"

#166

Post by UK-AL »

alan_cx wrote: post #48

Here in the UK, when I did my Computer Science degree, about a third to a half was programming. The rest of it was basically hardware and mathematical type theory. There was more but the point is, it covered computing in the whole. How CPU's actually work, how data is organised on a disk, what is actually going in in CAT5 between cards, etc. AI, Databases, servers, etc. The was another course, CS Software Engineering…

Computer Science is neither about hardware.

I built a basic CPU, but i'd class that as digital electronics. Building a a very simple CPU isn't really that hard either.

Re: Let's Not Call It "Computer Science" If We Really Mean "Computer Programming"

#167

Post by jlgreco »

capkutay wrote: post #139
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting with your ad hominem, I think you took exactly the wrong things away from this article. Regardless of his writing style, his points are dead-on: 1. Computer science doesn't teach programming (with the corollary that computer scientists specifically don't want to teach programming). 2. Most people going into computer science want to learn programming. 3. Many people get fed up with the rigors of computer scie…

In my experience as a CS student, the fist few classes you take teach you the basics of "computer programming"...aka you just write a lot of object oriented programs. Then as you move on to parallel programming, computer architecture, and operating systems, it really becomes more of a science.

> it really becomes more of a science.

This bugs me. There really should be another word for this, since, as far as I am concerned, something in which the scientific method plays such a secondary role should not be primarily classified as a science. I guess you could call it "a math", but that is not terribly satisfying.

This complaint is really just a rephrasing of the old "is mathematics science" debate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics#Mathematics_as_scie...), but as long as we are talking about if things that are "too engineery" are computer science, we might as well talk about if computer science is science.

Re: Let's Not Call It "Computer Science" If We Really Mean "Computer Programming"

#168

Post by snikolov »

jsprinkles wrote: post #152
ashishgandhi wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying people who do theoretical work don't don't it in practical ways? As an example, take Google's self-driving cars. Would you say the meat of their body of work theoretical? But would say the code they (Sebastian Thrun himself, and others involved in the project) write code that's not very practical, readable, maintainable or without tests? I would say what they do is theoretical work. And they write prac…

> As an example, take Google's self-driving cars. Would you say the meat of their body of work theoretical? No.

Would you care to elaborate? Surely most of the lines of code are not directly implementing theoretical things, but I would say the meat of the work is without a doubt theoretical.

Re: Let's Not Call It "Computer Science" If We Really Mean "Computer Programming"

#169

Post by dxbydt »

strictfp wrote: post #162
netvarun wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree with you. Software engineering 'ideas' regarding modeling and testing have gone way overboard. I have a feeling that that all those who peddle fancy buzzwords such as agile and kanban are either MBA graduates with no real engineering background or failed engineers trying to reinvent their career.

I'm a preacher of Agile. I talk about it in order to get things done. Theoretical work is important, but let's face it, most customers want products, not research. Your average person declaring himself 'theoretically oriented' is no good in delivering products. He hasn't understood the bigger goal and will just waste the clients time and money training himself to write better algos. Most likely he will be rather unex…

> most customers want products, not research

"I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already."

So said Alan Perlis, the first recepient of the ACM Turing award. I'll listen to Perlis all day than pay any attention to an Agile blowhard who calls himself a "thought leader" on his own biopage. customers can go fuck themselves. cs is what matters.

Re: Let's Not Call It "Computer Science" If We Really Mean "Computer Programming"

#170

Post by btb »

IMO CS is necessary to advance the state of the art. And while I completely agree that many computing/programming tasks currently do not necessarily require a CS degree, there is no guarentee that will always be the case.

As for my myself, I studied roughly 3 years of computer science before I dropped out to work full-time, so I only have a half-finished bachelors degree. I wont say I regret it, because the last 5-6 years of being partner in a startup and earning a good pay-check have been fun. But I very much do regret not being able to completely grasp all the new interesting research papers that are coming out. Nothing is more frustrating than reading a research paper, and knowing enough to be able to grasp that this algorithm could improve some part of your system, but then being unable to decipher/implement it, because one have forgotten(or not learned) parts of the mathematical notation/background. In other words being able to see the solution, but the solution being juuust out of your grasp. I hope down the road to be able to compensate for this problem by hiring smarter guys than myself that DID finish their CS degree :)

Also another benefit of studying CS is that around year 2-3 you will be introduced to some subject matter that I at least personally am pretty sure I would never have heard of otherwise. I found stuff like operations research and integer programming very interesting. I havent yet have had opportunity to use any of it in the "real world", but its nice knowing whats out there, who knows it might come in handy a few years down the road in some other venture.

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