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Comment by sloppycee | Hacker News Reader

Computer science is the science of the 'theory of computation' (essentially mathematics): proofs of correctness, complexity theory, numerical methods, symbolic logic, etc.

I am glad that your course is called 'computing' and _not_ computer science, since they are usually misconstrued (as in this article). I am all for teaching children how the digital world works, and introducing them to the concepts of electronics, programming etc. but it call it what it is.

Computer science != programming. Programming is an applied skill across nearly all scientific disciplines. Physicists, climate researchers, statisticians, etc, all require programming to do their research.

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Completely agree with your general sentiment "Computer Science != Programming" but disagree with the fact that you seem to discount it as a part of computer science all together. Computer science is all the things you listed and also includes a lot of programming in any applied capacity of it.

I agree these courses are often mislabeled and it does the discipline a great disservice, but programming is a part of a computer science education and programming language theory (which you can only really learn well from programming) is a part of computer science itself. How else can you put algorithmic theory and data structures into practice? It's just not the whole thing.

Computer science people on the more mathy side of the spectrum tend to discount applied computer science completely, and that annoys me. Maybe we shouldn't call a plain coder a computer scientist - but anyone who regularly applies theory in practical applications in a programming context and occasionally runs experiments should be considered an applied computer scientist.

For better or worse, a big part of studying computer science at the undergraduate (and presumably high school level) is programming. And programming is a part of computer science, but of course you're right coding/programming != computer science and that misconception is a problem.

I think the difficulty is the break between job title and discipline. And discipline titles (in all fields) have always been a bit historical-wonky.

By profession, we're all effectively software engineers, data engineers, or computer engineers, according to our work emphasis.

But then you've got the weird break you noted where academically and theoretically, everything we do is math. Or more reasonably, at least a larger proportion than any other discipline except physics and pure math.

So... we could always just go the physics route and retitle the discipline "Computing" and ourselves "Computerists"! (No trailing noun)

I bet you love this "Introducing AP Computer Science Principles" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1vFrz4NETg

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