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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

There's a bizarre lack of interest in CS in the psychology of usable systems - either for developers or for users - which takes into account practical requirements like cycle time.

A lot of CS seems to be story-telling: "This feature makes language X better/worse, because it just does, obviously" with no independent testing or peer review of language productivity and robustness in real work environments.

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I think that's why Go is so popular right now. I find the language kind of depressing from a PLT perspective, but it was built taking into account practical requirements such as fast compile times, a standard formatting tool, ease of deployment, etc, which makes it a very good system.

I would like you to cite some papers, which claims it makes language X better/worse without any explanation.

Well then, so much for it being Computer Science...

As-is, CS really is much closer to a branch of mathematics than a science.

Eh, in a similar way to how theoretical physics is mostly math. Math is the tool you're using, but the assumptions are all based on real-world observations.

I don't know about that; real world observations like what?

Like observations of what can and can't be computed by physical objects. The point of the Church-Turing thesis is that things you prove about Turing machines are proofs about what you can compute in the real world, not just some abstract mathematical model.

Since computers are built by people for people, it does seem like we're missing the most important and difficult science in favor of doing the science that's easy to do. It's easy to reason about how a system that I designed will perform. It's hard to answer the questions of how our technology choices affect other people. It would be great if science could help us design high quality systems with a limited budget, or establish a theory around whether designing any given system will improve someone's life. It would be pretty dang useful if we had some formal scientific results around what makes a game fun, or more generally what makes software pleasant to use and productive.

> establish a theory around whether designing any given system will improve someone's life

That would be sociology or one of its siblings, no?

... or, at best, the piddly "ethics" course that gets tacked on to most undergraduate CS degree programs?

Fortunately, computer science still literally means just that - it's an exploration of the properties of computers. As to humans developing computer based systems, yes, scientific rigor is not mandatory, just as you don't require understanding classical mechanics to build an abode. As to the psychology at play with humans developing and using computer based systems, rigorous psychology is eminently suited to your concerns.

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