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“Computer science is not about computers”

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Re: “Computer science is not about computers”

#71

Post by Aeolun »

benrbray wrote: post #55
iratewizard wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally feel the pain of this when trying to hire someone who understands core concepts in PL theory and can help maintain a framework. It's also not the sort of thing I can teach to my Sr devs on the job in under a year when they've never even touched anything like forth or lisp, or even tried to write a parser by hand.

I feel an analogous pain on the flip side of interviewing! I would kill for a job that lets me exercise some of these skills, rather than the brain rot of a typical software job which doesn't demand that one thinks too deeply about things.

React re-rendering logic requires one to think plenty deep.

Re: “Computer science is not about computers”

#72

Post by visarga »

mxscho wrote: post #29

In Europe, "Computer Science" is translated with a word that is a mix of "information" and "mathematics". University course names are: > [...] informatique (French), Informatik (German), informatica (Italian, Dutch), informática (Spanish, Portuguese), informatika (Slavic languages and Hungarian) or pliroforiki (πληροφορική, which means informatics) in Greek. Similar words have also been adopted in the UK (as in the S…

In Romania the top higher education institution in CS is called "Automatics" emphasizing the applications.

Re: “Computer science is not about computers”

#73

Post by js8 »

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 of computer science).

Finite sets in the rest of mathematics are sometimes considered uninteresting, but not so in computer science, where only very small sets (roughly of up to 32 elements, all subsets can be easily checked on a typical computer) are considered uninteresting.

Good example is number theory, which philosophically considers all natural numbers, regardless of size, to be equal type of objects. In computer science, the (although fuzzy) magnitude of numbers plays much bigger role.

Re: “Computer science is not about computers”

#74

Post by paxys »

I mostly agree with this. It's weird that you get an engineering degree called "science" which is mostly set up to prepare you for entering the commercial software industry. Universities can't even figure out which college to put the CS department under. There needs to be some sort of split where one track can focus on the academia/research and other on practical applied concepts.

Re: “Computer science is not about computers”

#75

Post by soegaard »

The beginning of this lecture (30 seconds in) by Harold Abelson (author of SICP - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) explains why Computer Science is a terrible name here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J_xL4IGhJA&list=PLE18841CAB...

Not sure about the year.

Re: “Computer science is not about computers”

#76

Post by anticristi »

We settled this debate at our department by calling ourselves the computing science department. This makes it clear that we are at the interface between the mathematics that algorithmically computes various things, but that these computations need to eventually end up on a machine that can be engineered today or in the future - a computer.

Re: “Computer science is not about computers”

#78

Post by mrweasel »

jmartinpetersen wrote: post #70

Seeing as the Danish "CS" degree deliberately[1] wasn't named "Computer Science", but "Datalogi"[2] (which translates rather directly to "Datalogy"), and since it happened in the sixties, I somehow assumed this article would end up mentioning Peter Naur in some way. [1]: http://www.naur.com/comp/c4-3.html [2]: http://www.naur.com/comp/c4-4.html

We also now have an education the is more equivalent to a US computer science degree: Software Engineer.

I think the US degrees are more focused on practicality than the Danish version. Basically the Danish universities will teach basic programming in one or two languages and the expect you to be smart enough to figure out the rest.

It’s not that one education is better than the other, but given that I didn’t end up doing reasearch of heavy computational work, I might have preferred a US education.

Re: “Computer science is not about computers”

#79

Post by redis_mlc »

neonological wrote: post #51
userbinator wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose if we call it computer science, then perhaps all the other forms of science should really be called "reverse engineering" (especially biology.)

Biology is consistent with science in the sense that there exists people called scientists in biology that do experiments utilizing the scientific method. In math everything is purely theoretical conjecture. No hypothesizes, no testing, no observation, just derivations of theorems from axioms. Same with "Computer Science" it's all logic games. That's why mathematicians are not known as scientists. For computing, I be…

> In math everything is purely theoretical conjecture. No hypothesizes, no testing, no observation, just derivations of theorems from axioms.

Sorry, no. Your statement is quite ignorant of how mathematics works, and how mathematicians create new theorems and proofs - your description is actually backwards.

Proofs often use axioms, but it's rare that somebody starts with a list of axioms and extends them to a higher-order theorem in a backwards fashion like some Prolog program.

In advanced pure math (ie. analysis), we usually start with a novel conceptual diagram (hypothesis) and decide which fields and axioms apply, so it's very creative. The language of mathematics is used to express original ideas that usually spring from imagination.

Some of the scenes in "Good Will Hunting" are pretty accurate, including the hallway blackboard, mirror and "flaming proof" scenes.

Re: “Computer science is not about computers”

#80

Post by benrbray »

Aeolun wrote: post #71
benrbray wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel an analogous pain on the flip side of interviewing! I would kill for a job that lets me exercise some of these skills, rather than the brain rot of a typical software job which doesn't demand that one thinks too deeply about things.

React re-rendering logic requires one to think plenty deep.

Of course, there's interesting work to be done at all levels of the stack. However, not every company will allocate time for solving frequently-encountered problems with creative solutions. Often, it's "ok, what's the minimum amount of time we can spend to fix this problem *right now*?", rather than "how can we make sure we don't have to re-solve this problem again ten more times in the future?"

Not me, but a friend described a whole team of engineers at his company hired to put out the fires caused by using database software that is a poor fit for the application, rather than biting the bullet and either 1) performing a migration or 2) rolling their own solution.

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