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Comment by hasenj | Hacker News Reader

Is there anything similar for computer science?

My PhD was in a CS (AI) topic and it's listed there as "Mathematics Subject Classification: 68—Computer science".

Maybe that's because I am 5th or so generation descendant of Hilbert but then again why wouldn't other CS PhDs also have a Mathematics grandfather++ when they go back long enough?

Ha, I just wrote a comment along these same lines. Given that many of the slide decks I had as a grad student had extensive genealogies at the start indicating where they evolved from I suspect that this is very much the case....despite it being a very young field.

The trees don't go back very far. We have at most 2 or 3 generations at this point.

That seems wrong. A fresh PhD doesn't have to wait a full generation for a graduate to father.

Too funny. Why do you think Computer Science is a unique subject of its own? Its deeply connected to mathematics and the only people doing CS back in the day were mathematicians. Go read some of Dijkstra's letters from the 50s. They are publicly available online. If you want to be a code monkey, have fun. But know that you are second rate to those that know the identities of computation. Mathematics is everything.

[1] Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist. A theoretical physicist by training, he worked as a programmer at the Mathematisch Centrum from 1952 to 1962. Wikipedia

You've certainly reproduced Dijkstra's opinion on the matter faithfully. Given that his life's work was pretty much to jet between conferences and bad-mouth those of his colleagues who actually DID produce useful software, it stands to reason that he would elevate mathematics over engineering.

Dijkstra contributed so much to actual computer science. You are way off base. Leslie Lamport was also a magnimonious computer scientist. Guess what his PHD was in? Mathematics with a dissertation in singularities of analytic partial differential equations. CS is absolute monkey business without a real mathematics education. Face it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport

It's not that mathematics does not have its uses as a tool. However, there is a big difference between pragmatists like Lamport and Knuth, who used their mathematical knowledge in the service of engineering projects, like building their own text processing system, and dogmatists like Dijkstra, who relied on underlings to type up his handwritten papers so he would not have to sully his hands by touching an actual computer.

Granted, Dijkstra did make some contributions to CS, but he also caused immense damage to CS education by promoting his vision of CS as exclusively a branch of applied mathematics, instead of an engineering discipline employing mathematics as one of several tools. That mentality has led to much preaching about constructing programs using top-to-bottom formal methods, and very few useful programs constructed that way.

Are you talking about the Dijkstra who wrote one of the earliest operating systems that introduced most of the OS concepts we use today, including mutual exclusion algorithms, deadlock detection and prevention, kernel/user mode etc or are you talking about someone else?

While the THE multiprogramming system may have had these, Multics had them roughly at the same time, and I'm pretty sure today's operating systems trace their use of these concepts back to Multics, rather than THE.

Amazing he did all these when jetting between conferences.

Can I quote you as a reference when arguing on the Internet that our OS concepts do not owe anything to Djikstra, who was only jetting between conferences? It sounds like you are pretty sure.

That's more or less why I asked the question. A lot of people in the programming field promote the notion that you can teach yourself coding and get by just fine.

This trend kind of worries me.

You can but only because most business logic and employed programming work requires shit for brains and grunt work.

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