Computer science is a liberal arts degree

CS, or any other "STEM" field, cannot be separated from human history, philosophy, ethics. As pure as it might seem, even maths and computers exist within a complex humanities context.

My point is the people in charge of curriculum and education are all $200K+/yr tenured professors in the style of CS is Knuth and Knuth is CS and that's the end of the convo, so no great surprise that CS curricula are mostly weed-out classes mixed with mathematical theory classes, because the old generation will always tutor the new generation in its own image.

You have to notice that everyone in the author's list of notables is very interesting but has ZERO soft power and none of them are tenured profs or administrative department heads at uni.

My gut level guess of where this is all going by my grandkids generation is there are about 1000 framing carpenters for every 100 general contractors and about 1 structural engineer (your locale may vary, ours has weird snow load problems). So in my grandkids generation "front end" "UI" people will likely come from apprenticeships or 2-year community college at most, whereas you want a "back-end" guy who can do some architecture he's going to have a very technical 4-year, and every company will have maybe one programmer with a classic CS background who does architecture and algo optimization all day.

When I was a young guy, everyone who graduated with a CS degree had to write a language using lex and yacc, maybe not much of a language but you had to get something to compile at minimum. Now I enjoyed that class immensely and it was one of my favorites and I've never used any of the skills since then, but that class is kinda dumb if 95%+ of jobs now will be front end javascript level work.

I am happy to equate exploitation with understanding, but then I don’t see how you could possibly understand Mathematics without exploiting computation.

The pyramids were built at least 1000 years before Pythagoras was even born. If division and trigonometry was needed to build them then the Egyptians understood and exploited division trigonometry before Pythagoras invented the language to explain/teach division and trigonometry.

It is not at all surprising that nobody else could understand (exploit, compute with) a language Pythagoras made up, but eventually he taught (indoctrinated?) some students on how to use his invention.

To compute with; and exploit any language first you must comprehend its grammar and semantics.

Still! The Babylonians could compute the square root of 2 (in practical terms, obviously they didn’t call it “square root of 2”) to arbitrary precision even without having numbers in their Mathematics.

Overall I don’t think we are disagreeing over anything substantial either way. Computation is the controlled manipulation of matter. Manipulating symbols to do useful things is a form of computation.

A fly may have some knowledge sufficient to exploit nature in the moment, but it doesn’t have the knowledge necessary to encode and communicate its knowledge to its peers. And it certainly can’t communicate its knowledge to generations 2500 (or more) years into the future.