Not really "computer science" topics, but useful nonetheless.
Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
51–60 of 308 posts
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#52> PSYC 4410: Obsessions of the Programmer Mind
I was definitely guilty of this in my last role. Some of my refactorings were good and needed, but also a distraction from saying the codebase was "good enough" and focusing on the broader people/team/process problems around me.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
The history of art or philosophy spans millenia. The effective history of computing spans a lifetime or three. There's no sense comparing the two. In the year 2500 it might make sense to be disappointed that people don't compare current computational practices with things done in 2100 or even 1970, but right now, to call what we have "history" does a disservice to the broad meaning of that term. Another issue: art an…
> To assert that the way problems were solved in 1970 obviously has dramatic lessons for how to solve them in 2025 seems to me to completely miss what we're actually doing with computers. True they might not all be "dramatic lessons" for us, but to ignore them and assume that they hold no lessons for us is also a tragic waste of resources and hard-won knowledge.
Its because CS is not cared about as a true science for the most part. Nearly all of the field is focused on consolidating power and money dynamics. No one cares to make a comprehensive history since it might give your competitors an edge.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could not disagree with you more. It would be easy for me to agree with you. I hold a graduate degree in computer science and I’m named for my contributions proofreading/correcting a graduate text about algorithms in computability theory. I love abstraction and algorithms and pure theory, but this whole “computer science is a branch of mathematics, nothing more” idea has always struck me as ridiculous. Are you will…
Cryptography is all math, networking is largely math and algorithms (IMO yes this should really be replaced with information theory. Just understanding Shannons paper would have been more valuable than learning about how routers work), AI is mostly statistics (And AI as a whole Id argue is the essence of computer science), graphics is largely math and algorithms. Yes I very much think a computer science degree should…
Yeah cryptography mostly (but certainly not all) math but it accounts for a negligible (pun intended) portion of interesting security work.
AI is a lot of math, especially if you hang out with the quasiconvex optimization crowd, but a vast majority of work in that field can not properly constitute “theory”
I think it’s clear in practice that computer science has officially strayed beyond whatever narrow bounds people originally wished to confine it to.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#55> CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies Alan Kay, my favorite curmudgeon, spent decades trying to remind us we keep reinventing concepts that were worked out in the late 70s and he’s disappointed we’ve been running in circles ever since. He’s still disappointed because very few programmers are ever introduced to the history of computer science in the way that artists study the history of art or philosophers the histo…
I reflect on university, and one of the most interesting projects I did was an 'essay on the history of ' as part of an OS course. I chose OS X (Snow Leopard) and digging into the history gave me fantastic insights into software development, Unix, and software commercialisation. Echo your Mr Kay's sentiments entirely.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#56> CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies Alan Kay, my favorite curmudgeon, spent decades trying to remind us we keep reinventing concepts that were worked out in the late 70s and he’s disappointed we’ve been running in circles ever since. He’s still disappointed because very few programmers are ever introduced to the history of computer science in the way that artists study the history of art or philosophers the histo…
The history of art or philosophy spans millenia. The effective history of computing spans a lifetime or three. There's no sense comparing the two. In the year 2500 it might make sense to be disappointed that people don't compare current computational practices with things done in 2100 or even 1970, but right now, to call what we have "history" does a disservice to the broad meaning of that term. Another issue: art an…
If Alan Kay doesn't respond directly to this comment, what is Hacker News even for? :)
You're not wrong about history, but that only strengthens Kay's case. E.g., our gazillion-times better physical substrate should have led an array of hotshot devs to write web apps that run circles around GraIL[1] by 2025. (Note the modeless GUI interaction.) Well, guess what? Such a thing definitely doesn't exist. And that can only point to programmers having a general lack of knowledge about their incredibly short history.
(In reality my hope is some slice of devs have achieved this and I've summoned links to their projects by claiming the opposite on the internet.)
Edit: just so I get the right incantation for summoning links-- I'm talking about the whole enchilada of a visual language that runs and rebuilds the user's flowchart program as the user modelessly edits it.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well this has nothing to do with computer science so there's that
I could not disagree with you more. It would be easy for me to agree with you. I hold a graduate degree in computer science and I’m named for my contributions proofreading/correcting a graduate text about algorithms in computability theory. I love abstraction and algorithms and pure theory, but this whole “computer science is a branch of mathematics, nothing more” idea has always struck me as ridiculous. Are you will…
You've just named most of the interesting stuff.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never felt that way, and I’ve worked on a variety of projects at a variety of companies. Everyone has a bespoke mishmash of nonsense pipelines, build tools, side cars, load balancers, Terragrunt, Terraform, Tofu, Serverless, Helm charts, etc. There are enough interesting things here that you wouldn’t even need to make a tool heavy project style software engineering course - you could legitimately make a real l…
Merging strategies, conflict resolution, bisect debugging, and version control in general are very computer sciencey. Would make a great course.
That’s not even getting into the fact that you could basically teach multiple graduate level distributed computing courses with k8s as a case study
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#59It is interesting that no software engineering or computer science course I’ve seen has ever spent any time on CI/CD. Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, none of these sorts of things - and I don’t even mean these specific technologies, but moreover nothing even in their ballpark.
I'm doing this in the software engineering¹ course I teach.
However:
a) Practical CI/CD requires understanding (and some practical experience) of many other concepts like Linux shell scripting, version control, build automation, containers, server administration, etc. As few students (in our degree programme) have sufficient experience in these concepts, I spend about half of the semester teaching such devops basics instead of actual software engineering.
b) Effectively, teaching CI/CD means teaching how GitHub or GitLab do CI/CD. I feel a little bit uncomfortable teaching people how to use tech stacks owned by a single company.
¹) Actually it's more a course on basic software craftsmanship for media informatics students because no such course exists in our curriculum and I find it more important that students learn this than that they understand the V model.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#60CSCI 4083: Developing Software Alongside Other Human Beings