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There doesn't even seem to be an agreed upon definition of what liberal arts truly are in 2022 so this whole discussion seems quite pointless to me.
Yes, but not as the author describes it. The author has a very narrow and circumscribed view of liberal arts. Going back to the beginnings: The “liberal” in Liberal Arts comes from liberate. The arts that free the soul. In its original formulation it had the trivium (rhetoric, grammar, logic) and the quadrivium (geometry, astronomy, music, arithmetic). People like the author commonly associate the whole project with…
1) This is ass backwards. We don't need CS who know about accounting, hr, etc. Jobs of the future will be automated. Dev is an essential skill, the same way English or maths used to be. We need these professionals to learn how to code to "gain one level up", and make the computer do whatever devs are building for them now. 2) Market has needs for a lot of people who know how to program using high level frameworks. CS programs have evolved accordingly. 20y ago, it was a room full of geeks (with the original meaning), coding on freebsd. Program had electronics, assembler, C, you learned to build a compiler from scratch, a virtual machine, a shell, stdio, etc. There was a lot of tinkering with dark bsd flavors. Programs today are at a much higher level, learning how to use react, and frameworks built by others. To the point where I see devs who don't know what OSI means and don't even know how to reinstall windows themselves. I don't think it's bad, I think the need for CS has remained somewhat similar, what we need today is app developers which is very different. You don't need a tech genius to build an accounting app. You need someone who can understand these needs and transfer them into relatively straight forward code over all the abstraction levels built by these tech geniuses.
So I think the claim that CS is a liberal art is preposterous. I think that what people call CS has evolved into two things, CS and App dev, the latter which should start moving to other professionals, and that people didn't realize it yet.
As to whether one feels better about having a BA vs a BS, in reality most people don't care too much about things like that. A BA may leave more room for classes in other subjects, which can be beneficial. A BS might be better preparation for a grad program in that subject, otherwise your grad program might require a year of in-subject coursework.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately whether paulcole likes something isn’t the only way we categorise things. However just in case it really catches on, could you keep us updated as your tastes change, so we can stay current.
Feel free to reject my reality and substitute your own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not really much of a debate. If I like the thing then it definitely belongs in the category I like. If I don’t like the thing then it definitely belongs in the category I don’t like.
Unfortunately whether paulcole likes something isn’t the only way we categorise things. However just in case it really catches on, could you keep us updated as your tastes change, so we can stay current.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author isn't the only one confusing the two, a very large % of kids in college confuse the two. They don't even know what they (or their parents) are actually buying, just that it's the required training for a career, thus they assume practical skills are what they are getting.
This is because companies have basically made university vocational training. They don't want to train their employees, so they want the universities to do it. This harms both universities (as institutes of learning) and students, imo, but the companies come out ahead so it pushes on sadly.
Ah, the ever green tradition of humans to define very fuzzy categories and then debating enlessly about what stuff belongs to what category.
For example what's the difference between a boat and a raft? At what point is a water vehicle a boat and at what point is it a raft? Any debate on this is simply a linguistic debate disguised as a philosophical one. There's a gradient from boat to raft and people are just debating about a positional problem of where the line of delineation falls. This example is obvious though.
Less obvious is the word "life." When is something classified as living and when is it it classified as not alive? Is a rock alive? Is a plant? Is a deep learning dall-e 3 alive? Is a human alive? Is a brain dead human alive? Seems like a deep philosophical argument but my point here is to say that this argument is as pointless as the boat and the raft.
This thread is the same thing. Pointless debate on whether CS is a liberal arts or not? It's a debate on linguistics. You're all just trying to debate about definitions of arbitrary words. Nothing interesting.
This is downstream of publish-or-perish. My point is the people in charge of curriculum and education are all $200K+/yr tenured professors in the style of CS is Knuth and Knuth is CS and that's the end of the convo, so no great surprise that CS curricula are mostly weed-out classes mixed with mathematical theory classes, because the old generation will always tutor the new generation in its own image. You have to not…
> but that class is kinda dumb if 95%+ of jobs now will be front end javascript level work. I think this sentence sums it up more than relating it to publish-or-perish. It comes down to what is the purpose of university . Is it job training, as companies want it to be (because why should they train their employees when they can outsource it; this has led students to expect it to be job training too), or is it actuall…
A lot of folks here seem to have a real rose-tinted idea of what CS degrees are actually like. If you took CS more than 10, 15 years ago, you might remember it as a scrappy, fringey degree program, maybe splintered off from Electrical Engineering, a refuge for mathematically-minded nerds to find beauty in the cold algorithmic elegance of computation. That is not what it is anymore, not now that everyone knows you can…