“Computer science is not about computers” • Hacker News Board

Re: “Computer science is not about computers”

#291

Post by btilly » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 3:11 AM UTC

js8 wrote: post #284

btilly wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's see. Dijkstra introduced the A* graph search algorithm. Knuth wrote THE classic algorithms book. Peter Naur is best known for his work on parsing (he is the N in BNF notation). Even if you try to draw a distinction between computer science and software engineering, most of the people writing those papers were pretty squarely on the computer science side. But I don't draw that distinction. ALL of them were tenur…

Your claim (as you explain elsewhere) seems to be that because discipline of software engineering exists and is related to computer science (and there is a fuzzy boundary between the two), we cannot think of computer science as a subfield of mathematics. I honestly don't see how that follows. Does the fact that writing LAPACK required software engineering mean that numerical linear algebra is not a part of mathematic…

My claim is not that software engineering is related to computer science, it is that software engineering IS PART of computer science. And being part of it, means that computer science is not merely an applied subfield of mathematics. A truth that mathematicians and computer scientists accepted decades ago when computer science split off from mathematics into its own department.

AS for your example of LAPACK, "The existence of evening, my dear Boswell, does not mean that day is the same as night." Numerical linear algebra is on a boundary between mathematics and computer science. There is a large boundary between math and computer science. But then again the same can be said of, say, math and physics. But by the time you're worried about how to use caching effectively, and make that work in a distributed computation, you're pretty far on the computer science side.

Also your idea of grouping them because of research methods is problematic at best. For example machine learning research has a highly experimental flavor that does not fit in mathematics at all. Quantum computing contains a lot that is closer to a field of applied physics than of mathematics. And so on.

Re: “Computer science is not about computers”

#292

Post by avgDev » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 6:20 PM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #179

CS is a way of thinking about how to solve things, with regards to efficiency of solution. Example: my wife likes to put gym shorts and shirts in different drawers. To my CS mind that doubles the seek time of a retrieval. The little bowl by the door is a cache of my most recently used stuff. People who nearly file their papers (eg bills) nearly are optimizing for retrieval efficiency - of an operation that is actuall…

Learning programming almost feels like a curse. I guess I was naturally predisposed to something like programming as I always remember liking efficiency and making things more efficient.

However, after getting a CS degree and building things at work....I get upset a lot. I see so many things that are unoptimized and get angry when I have to wait because the process is bad.

I refuse to do things without proper tools, as I don't want to fiddle with something for hours while a proper tool can achieve a desired result in minutes.

Now, that I think about this it has been affecting me greatly.

Re: “Computer science is not about computers”

#293

Post by musicale » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 8:27 PM UTC

twobitshifter wrote: post #195

js8 wrote: post #73

My view is quite unconventional, but I believe, computer science is a branch of mathematics that deals with large but finite structures (so they need an algorithmic description). Compare with most of "legacy" mathematics, which studies countable structures (so the description can use arbitrary series). Of course, there are larger sets, but they mostly serve as a theater (just like countable infinity is just a theater…

Before there was a CS major at many universities you would major in mathematics if you wanted to work with computers. John Kemeny majored in mathematics and taught “Finite Mathematics” while a professor. He saw the application of BASIC not as a new field but as a way to simplify computers so that it wasn’t only mathematicians and scientists who could program them.

Dartmouth is an example of a CS department coming out of the Math department rather than the EE department.

I tend to think that basic (though probably something like Python/numpy rather than BASIC proper) programming fits well into many math courses. The fact that modern TI calculators can run Python seems to mesh nicely with this. (And classic calculators with BASIC also have a long history.)

Math courses often in introduce algorithms for arithmetic and algebraic computation, so some coverage of algorithms as a concept seems to fit as well.

> BASIC not as a new field but as a way to simplify computers so that it wasn’t only mathematicians and scientists who could program them.

This is a fantastic vision. Of course mathematicians and scientists also benefit from user-friendly languages like BASIC or Python. But the idea that computer programming (and computing in general) could be helpful to undergraduates majoring in humanities and social sciences, and perhaps to the public at large, was probably still a fairly radical idea in the 1960s! Trying to make that happen by creating a programming language that first-year students could learn in an afternoon (or so) was/is a remarkable step toward making that vision real.