Computer science is a liberal arts degree

I don't think that's what the author is doing. I think the author is arguing that the skills taught in liberal art degrees are often skills that people who do computer science need but don't value. Becuase computer science degrees answer the question of "how to build" not "what to build" but the value is in "what to build".

My perspective here is probably quite different, because of my cultural background. Here in Germany there is a pretty clear division between CS at a university (Universität), "CS" at a college (Fachhochschule), and "CS" as an apprenticeship (Fachinformatikausbildung). I'm putting quotation marks on the latter two, because calling it a science is already a large stretch in the first case, as I would distinguish between engineering and science, but that's a minor point. The latter two have nothing or very little to do with research, and are all about giving practical knowledge to help people get jobs/get good employees.

> Some people in this thread seem to think colleges have been taken over by javascript, and that may be true in some places, but I wish they'd taught us JS, because what they taught me was Java Swing, because a decade ago the ivory-tower tenured professor who wrote that course thought it would be useful for getting us a job and never touched it again.

You get a BS to understand (hard) concepts. Java makes a lot of sense to teach because of good resources, longevity, and it implementing a lot of the underlying ideas of OOP. Is it a great language? Not at all, but knowing it makes it very easy to learn other OOP languages. My faculty is currently discussing a larger BS reform, and this is one of the topics. We have a course for second semester students called "Intro to OOP". What are the alternatives to Java? Most other OOP languages do not implement all the typical concepts of OOP, or are highly platform dependent, or might be just a fluke. C++ is quite rough, and there is another course teaching OS with C in the same semester. Personally, I think people in the course should be able to choose between writing their assignments in something that compiles to java bytecode, but that massively increases overhead for TAs.

> In fact I would go a step further: Having a lot of people who are very good at programming but who don't know anything else is a bad thing for society.

This I would agree with, and add that this is also really terrible for programmers. Compared to other engineering disciplines, our discipline is massively underdeveloped in the realm of strong guidelines backed up by empirical research. If you look at the subfield of Software Engineering (which I'd say is another misnomer, as this is actually pretty much the only empirical part of CS, and at that mostly a social science), it is hard to find very strong consensus on what and how to do it. Actual practice is, I'd argue, more influenced by medium posts than the papers published in the field. There are a lot of strong opinions, and very little but personal experience to back these things up.

> What good is it going to do any of us to write systems that strip away all our civil liberties with perfect big-O complexity?

I'd also strongly argue that everyone should be educated in ethics, but education in morality does not make a moral person, I think this is one of the really hard problems that universities can try to help alleviate, but not solve alone.

It’s in the set of all things not in a set.

The point about Pythagoras is that he made Math really popular and maybe even enough broad to use it for Liberal Arts. The Egyptians which have build pyramids used to keep all their Mathematics in secret, only priests and some high-rankings could learn from their sources - and for limited set of goals.

What about Babylonians, their math (as well as Egyptian's) were too complicated for writing and (unless Greek's) was experienced some lack of integrity. For example, did Babylonians know that the square root of 2 is irrational? Pythagorians knew that exactly.

For me it is much more handy to consider well-known Pythagoras as father of our omnipotent Mathematics instead of some anonymous Babylonian who does not have an epic story about stealing some knowledge from totalitarian company and presenting it to mortals like Robin Good or Prometheas. And in that formulation I consider omnipotent Mathematics to be younger than Physics which even now has not achieved omnipotency level (hint about Theory of Everything).

And sorry but I have nothing to say should a CS be a part of Liberal Arts.

It’s sadly a repeating phenomenon that when anything too humanistic is proposed here, the argument is often dismissed. Here, as just linguistic or even just philosophical. The actual argument gets lost, and nobody here seems interested in the actual papers the author is referencing. To me, the meat of the argument is:

What do the fields/papers (whih the author IS referring to, very concretely) have to offer to the discussion about where the field of CS, and its business applications, should be going?

This way we don’t have to discuss category boundaries. The concrete implications of the arguments are there to evaluate.

That the actual substance is dismissed here out of hand is quite frustrating to me.