I code like a girl

>Engineering is hard, CS is soft.

I see a few reasons for this (at least where I went to university).

First, CS required less math classes. Harder than most sciences, but still not as much as the default for engineers. There was a correlation between who math a STE major required and how hard it was viewed. Psychology which didn't require calculus and had a watered down stats course was considered the weakest. Physics and Engineering was at the top.

Second, professors in engineering were far less forgiving (I took a few classes). They were stricter and while their work wasn't harder, they were far more likely to just give a 0 for doing something wrong. Also their tests had more chain problems (answer to question 1 is input to question 2), and every one I had always insisted you had to have the right answer (so if you had the right answer to question 2 using the wrong answer from question 1, you got a 0).

Third, there were easy computer degrees. Name a degree in Information Management, while not CS, was often associated and it did not require the most complex CS classes. There were not easy engineering degrees.

Did you cherry pick these examples to some ironic purpose?

Sophie Wilson was "born Roger Wilson" (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson).

"While struggling with life in a male role, Conway had been married to a woman and had two children." (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway)

>it is an original scientific work

What does this even mean really? That they did a bunch of research and instead of writing numerous papers wrong a single book? Does it give a detailed explanation of each experiment enough so that they can be repeated? Or is it like those pop-sci books that take a few specifically picked studies, a lot of anecdotes, and a few 'expert' interviews and try to get the average reader convinced on a point (which may or may not be correct)?

I'm sorry, did you just call me evil because I said you should treat women equally? Get your head checked.

    > "Software design and programming were considered clerical work."

I realize that there's a certain art of code, and even a science that goes into the underlying algorithms, languages, and methodologies. Indeed I've spent the majority of my life now in one way or another transfixed by software development.

But it seems to me that the vast amount of code written is still, in fact, "clerical work". Whether it's gluing together enterpriseBeanBuilderExpressionListMochaBusinessLogicAuditingFactories, or hooking up your node.js to your express.js to your bootstrap.js to transfer JSON over REST into your DOM, or even converting your 4000 character, 50 pipe bash one-liners into nicely polished scripts that properly account for exit codes, handle non-standard locations for sysfs, and work on a multitude of platforms, at the end of the day, a lot of this really does come down to clerical-style work. The difference is that the language, terminology, abstractions, and platforms are more obtuse than the previous generation's clerical work. The nouns are different and strange, but the predicates are all the same.

There are indeed wondrous areas in computer science and software engineering, but I think for most of us, we're just doing fairly menial work. We feel smart doing it, because it's still new enough that the objects and content of it are still uncustomary for most folks, and in fact the best of secretaries and clerks have indeed possessed great intelligence. But at the end of the day, we need to recognize that most of what we do is mere clerical work, glorified only by the odd shapes of the more obscure symbol keys on our keyboards.

ducks

"I swear, by clerical, I meant the clergy!"

ducks again