21–30 of 34 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People often mistake software engineering, or IT with computer science. Those are not science.
Is computer science even science? It feels like we should have called ourselves computationally-applied mathematicians.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a line between the discovered stuff and the invented stuff. I always love to see it spelled out in different ways. I tell my students that you can understand And rediscover the science part by understanding basic principles, by applying mathematical logic. While the engineering part you need to learn , as the engineering decisions are full of conventions and constraints of the time of invention and the people…
Is there? When it comes to math and abstract concepts such as these I can see no such line. To me it seems e.g. the real numbers were invented about as much as they were discovered. Same goes for the semaphore. (Of course the exact syntax and semantics of let’s say semaphores in POSIX belong to a different category. But I’m not sure I’d want to call it an “invention”.)
But take the Sieve algorithm that was posted yesterday[0], or Powersort[1] (Timsort with its bugs fixed). To some degree those are more engineering discoveries about which algorithm behaves best with real-world data. Although Powersort actually involves a lot of formal maths to prove it does not have degenerate edge-cases, so maybe I should have stuck with Timsort.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People often mistake software engineering, or IT with computer science. Those are not science.
Is computer science even science? It feels like we should have called ourselves computationally-applied mathematicians.
Here is Allen Newell, Alan Perlis, and Herbert Simon's response (1967) to your question about whether computer science is even science. For context, the three of them are Turing Award winners and early pioneers of computer science. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~choset/whatiscs.html
Professors of computer science are often asked: "Is there such a thing as computer science, and if there is, what is it?" The questions have a simple answer:
Wherever there are phenomena, there can be a science to describe and explain those phenomena. Thus, the simplest (and correct) answer to "What is botany?" is, "Botany is the study of plants." And zoology is the study of animals, astronomy the study of stars, and so on. Phenomena breed sciences.
There are computers. Ergo, computer science is the study of computers. The phenomena surrounding computers are varied, complex, rich. It remains only to answer the objections posed by many skeptics.
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This is Science. Computer Science. From one of the greatest alive. "This is a preliminary version of a book. If you have any comments to make or questions to ask about it, please contact me by email. But when you do, include the version date. I expect there are many minor errors in this version. (I hope there are no major ones.) Anyone who is the first to report any error will be thanked in the book. If you find an e…
People often mistake software engineering, or IT with computer science. Those are not science.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a line between the discovered stuff and the invented stuff. I always love to see it spelled out in different ways. I tell my students that you can understand And rediscover the science part by understanding basic principles, by applying mathematical logic. While the engineering part you need to learn , as the engineering decisions are full of conventions and constraints of the time of invention and the people…
Is there? When it comes to math and abstract concepts such as these I can see no such line. To me it seems e.g. the real numbers were invented about as much as they were discovered. Same goes for the semaphore. (Of course the exact syntax and semantics of let’s say semaphores in POSIX belong to a different category. But I’m not sure I’d want to call it an “invention”.)
One of the stronger arguments that the real numbers were discovered, rather than invented, is their “unreasonable effectiveness” in aiding our exploration and understanding of the physical world.
The same can’t be said for equally abstract but clearly invented concepts such as the rules of chess.
It's appropriate that this is appearing at the death of Niklaus_Wirth. He really was the first to get serious about formalizing concurrency. P and V, and all that. This feels very retro. I used to work on this sort of thing, but that was back in the early 1980s. This reads like something from back then, when people were first figuring out how to think about concurrency.[1] That's how people thought about this back th…
This is Science. Computer Science. From one of the greatest alive. "This is a preliminary version of a book. If you have any comments to make or questions to ask about it, please contact me by email. But when you do, include the version date. I expect there are many minor errors in this version. (I hope there are no major ones.) Anyone who is the first to report any error will be thanked in the book. If you find an e…
People often mistake software engineering, or IT with computer science. Those are not science.
Praxis’ method was a practical application of these concepts used in industry:
https://www.anthonyhall.org/Correctness_by_Construction.pdf
If the design is the hypothesis, would you count that as science?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there? When it comes to math and abstract concepts such as these I can see no such line. To me it seems e.g. the real numbers were invented about as much as they were discovered. Same goes for the semaphore. (Of course the exact syntax and semantics of let’s say semaphores in POSIX belong to a different category. But I’m not sure I’d want to call it an “invention”.)
This is a much-debated question in the philosophy of mathematics. One of the stronger arguments that the real numbers were discovered, rather than invented, is their “unreasonable effectiveness” in aiding our exploration and understanding of the physical world. The same can’t be said for equally abstract but clearly invented concepts such as the rules of chess.
It's appropriate that this is appearing at the death of Niklaus_Wirth. He really was the first to get serious about formalizing concurrency. P and V, and all that. This feels very retro. I used to work on this sort of thing, but that was back in the early 1980s. This reads like something from back then, when people were first figuring out how to think about concurrency.[1] That's how people thought about this back th…
> He really was the first to get serious about formalizing concurrency. P and V, and all that. The computer science of concurrency began with Dijkstra, not Wirth. And it was Dijkstra who introduced the P and V semaphore operations [1]. [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD01xx/E...
”This is not the place for modesty. I was very good at concurrency.” Agreed!