Computer Science is classified as a liberal arts degree at William & Mary: https://catalog.wm.edu/content.php?catoid=24&navoid=3884.
Computer science is a liberal arts degree
71–80 of 158 posts
Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment is written like a logic puzzle rather than as prose that’s meant to make sense. Well, at least the start of it is, which can be enough to persuade someone to stop reading an move on
A logic puzzle by a computer scientist? Imagine that! If you don’t understand the reference to the Liar’s paradox you have self-selected yourself as somebody who doesn’t understand computer science. Similarly: if you prefer prose (which is for humans) and shy away from logic (which is for computation) your interests are better aligned with the “woke” liberal arts; than with computer science.
There are plenty of talented programmers here who value prose as a means to communicate clearly. Your post failed to do that, and your sarcasm and insults to the intelligence and motives of other commenters are against the spirit of this place.
Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
A logic puzzle by a computer scientist? Imagine that! If you don’t understand the reference to the Liar’s paradox you have self-selected yourself as somebody who doesn’t understand computer science. Similarly: if you prefer prose (which is for humans) and shy away from logic (which is for computation) your interests are better aligned with the “woke” liberal arts; than with computer science.
There are plenty of talented programmers here who value prose as a means to communicate clearly. Your post failed to do that, and your sarcasm and insults to the intelligence and motives of other commenters are against the spirit of this place.
No post body was provided.
Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree
#74A lot of folks here seem to have a real rose-tinted idea of what CS degrees are actually like. If you took CS more than 10, 15 years ago, you might remember it as a scrappy, fringey degree program, maybe splintered off from Electrical Engineering, a refuge for mathematically-minded nerds to find beauty in the cold algorithmic elegance of computation. That is not what it is anymore, not now that everyone knows you can…
I agree with the other response that programmers usually don't have much say in those decisions that would lead us into a dystopia, but also, in my experience pretty much everyone in STEM fields these days is atleast a junior level programmer, so it's somewhat contradictory to me to say that mathematicians are harmless but programmers are not.
Plus, at least at my university, an engineering ethics class was mandatory in the final year of undergrad. There was also a big general education component (~25% of the degree) that did involve various humanities classes (stuff like "Eastern Religions", "Indian Classical Music" and "History of American Art", an extra language class if you weren't already bilingual etc) and from what I understand, other universities generally have a higher ratio of general education requirements.
So I find it odd to suggest that programmers "don't know anything else", because at least in my experience, they clearly do.
Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We had mathematics long before we had physics. I disagree. People haven't had a Mathematics before Pythagoras. All Mathematics people had at that moment was that 1 golden coin + 1 golden coin = 2 golden coins or one copper knife. But trading is not mathematics if not talking about modern things like HFT with broad using of probability theory (and we obviously are talking about ancient times). Physics is understanda…
Mathematics is a language, but then why are you saying there was no Mathematics before Pythagoras? Obviously Pythagoras didn’t invent language! Long before Pythagoras people had been using language for doing and expressing computation. Pāṇini did it. The Babylonians did it. It then took us a few thousand years to mechanize that knowledge and invent computers as we know them. As for physics being “understandable” - I…
> Mathematics is a language, but then why are you saying there was no Mathematics before Pythagoras? Obviously Pythagoras didn’t invent language!
He did invent the language. When Pythagoras used to teach some folks the division (mathematical operation required for Trigonometry which is required for building Egyptian Pyramids) he faced with un-understanding of "why we should learn this silly useless numbers?" Then Pythagoras has invented a music (consonance and dissonance at least) and everyone started to learn Math because most of us can hear that numbers which may lead to either consonance or dissonance.
> you are conflating the ability to exploit nature with the ability to understand it.
Yes you are right, I do not see how can you understand Physics/Nature without exploiting anything. And if you are enough successful to exploit something so why not to claim that I have gained some understanding.
> There would be no physics without humans inventing it just like there would be no language without humans inventing it.
I think two instances of "humans" word are extra, that words don't add anything into the discussion of some mathematical and physical concepts.
And I keep staying on my opinion that: if one fly can do something complicated in controllable experiments set by human (kind of pull this rope and get some sugar) and another fly can learn this queue of actions from the trained fly, that means that after the experiment both flies share some physical knowledge about Nature.
Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree
#76Ah, the ever green tradition of humans to define very fuzzy categories and then debating enlessly about what stuff belongs to what category.
Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree
#77I think the author is conflating vocational education with university curriculum. It is often the case that universities offer courses that are much more theoretical than the practical application, even medical studies to some extent begin with very high level concepts and theories; the reason for this is because they’re attempting to optimise for better understanding of the underlying foundations of the discipline t…
The author isn't the only one confusing the two, a very large % of kids in college confuse the two. They don't even know what they (or their parents) are actually buying, just that it's the required training for a career, thus they assume practical skills are what they are getting.
Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree
#78Social Science, Ergonomics and Psychology aren't liberal arts subjects. Mediaeval History, French Literature and (arguably) Architecture are examples of liberal arts. I think there's an argument to be made that computer scientists benefit from studying liberal arts; but I think the author fails to make that argument (let alone that CS is actually liberal arts, as per the subject).
> Mediaeval History, French Literature and (arguably) Architecture are examples of liberal arts. Wait a minute, what of 7 liberal arts are History and Literature in? I can not see any place for that in both Trivium and Quadrivium.
Trivium and Quadrivium aren't really liberal arts, at least not any more. Trivium was logic, grammar and rhetoric - the basics for understanding and making arguments; quadrivium was music, astronomy, geometry and arithmetic - the "proper" subjects that one might want to argue about.
I'd be inclined to count astronomy, geometry and arithmetic as STEM subjects, rather than liberal arts. But I don't think trivium and quadrivium have been a thing since the Middle Ages, and I'm sure that's not what the author was referring to.
Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree
#79If the point of a CS education is to prepare people to work in software (and that assertion is debatable!)
There's a lot of heavy lifting being done by that parenthetical. I don't think the point of a CS education is to prepare people to work in software. It's to teach them the theoretical groundings of computation and how to engage in abstract reasoning about it. It always felt a lot more similar to applied mathematics to me than anything else.
I sense an is/ought conflation from the author. I could agree that software engineering as a profession could benefit from more practitioners with a liberal arts background.
The thing is, I just don't know if that is necessary for more than a self selecting group. A liberal arts degree has more to do with going to a liberal arts institution with a common core curriculum that teaches one how to read, write, and interact critically with great books and history. I had such an undergraduate experience and I felt like a benefitted from it significantly.
It's hard to get into a good liberal arts college, just like it's hard to get into an Ivy League institution. I don't think one can democratize the intrinsically elitist aspects of a holistic liberal arts education because the vast majority of people are simply not interested in it and will never be. The only way I could see that changing is with a vast fundamental overhaul of the K-12 education system that actually prepares citizens from childhood to adulthood for such an education; in which case I think it is then perfectly fine and reasonable to expect the entire adult populous to be prepared to get such an education.
It seems like this is how it works in many European countries. But it's not how it works in the USA, where I live.
Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree
#80A lot of folks here seem to have a real rose-tinted idea of what CS degrees are actually like. If you took CS more than 10, 15 years ago, you might remember it as a scrappy, fringey degree program, maybe splintered off from Electrical Engineering, a refuge for mathematically-minded nerds to find beauty in the cold algorithmic elegance of computation. That is not what it is anymore, not now that everyone knows you can…
How many programmers are making those decisions on their own and how many are doing what their PM told them do to, at the command of ever higher ups? It's a weird trend to blame all tech outcomes on programmers who often have the least amount of control over what the systems the build are intended to do.
> how many are doing what their PM told them do to, at the command of ever higher ups?
There will always be sociopaths. The problem is the skilled people who can rationalize enabling them.