Comment by adjkant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adjkant | Hacker News Reader

An interesting tangent I think about sometimes:

I think when people think about "programmers/developers" vs "computer scientists", this is where the difference could really show up in the future. A developer who knows how to code and hack may not have the skill/design knowledge to properly create a language/DSL, perhaps making a monster in the process. A well trained computer scientist (academic, self taught, doesn't matter) should have those tools and more importantly the design know how. A lot of teaching (again in both academia and not) really lacks on teaching good design for programming generally.

I think we're already starting to see this difference show up with libraries and frameworks (somewhat already DSL's themselves), and if we keep moving towards the direction of DSL's I think you will find many of the bright programmers of tomorrow going away from writing code to make things but instead code to make languages to make things. The final step of code to thing (from a technical perspective) seems to become increasingly boilerplate more than ever before as tooling keeps expanding. You still need to know the deep internals for large scale things, but it's never been easier to spin up a quick project that "just works" and does quite a lot. If library/framework/language creators do their job, this should only get easier.

At a certain point I wonder if the actual programming ever becomes a "lower tier" of the software world.

> A developer who knows how to code and hack may not have the skill/design knowledge to properly create a language/DSL, perhaps making a monster in the process. A well trained computer scientist (academic, self taught, doesn't matter) should have those tools and more importantly the design know how.

The author of Beautiful Racket, Matthew Butterick, is a lawyer and a typographer. He is not a computer scientist. And yet, he designed a DSL called Pollen for creating web-based books. Pollen has been quite successful within the Racket community.

My understanding is that Racket is predicated on the idea that people like Matthew, as much as people like your computer scientists, are the best authors of DSLs. They are the ones who understand the domains they're working in. If the division you predict ever does exist, it is because the tools have failed to make people who are not computer scientists capable of creating the DSLs they need to solve their problems. It's not because languages are inherently better designed by experts in the domain of programming languages.

Why wouldn't the author qualify as a self taught computer scientist though? To me your point more of a statement on the accessibility of computer science first, and I do completely agree that the accessibility is important, which the Racket/HtDP ecosystem does pretty well with.

That said, there's many ways to write code and learn to code, and I think of the web programming bootcamp style or the cookie cutter college grads who go through four years learning how to program in X language to work at fancy company Y. My point is that many routes are just not focusing on the higher level design skills that I think are needed to make good libraries/frameworks/DSL's.

To clarify, I'm not saying you have to be a PL expert, simply good at program and language design, which I think is what lacks in many places and could create such a division. That skill is/should be accessible to everyone.

I never understood why CS people are so afraid of non-CS people touching language development. They hide the keys as much as possible so nobody but the predestinates can touch it. Racket gives that key. Despite that few people will use it (probably only the most prepared) and if these languages hacks are completely non-sense they'll fail. The world will not suffer much with this process.

If anything "CS people" are less afraid than they should be, given the demonstrated popularity of horrible retrograde languages designed by people who didn't know what they were doing.

Ok, I think I read more into your first comment than you actually said.

>many routes are just not focusing on the higher level design skills that I think are needed to make good libraries/frameworks/DSL's.

I have observed that too. But I don't think this is about who is and isn't a computer scientist, whether self-taught or formally trained. I think it's more a change in the way people relate to programming languages. Perhaps programming languages were commonly assumed to be principally an academic topic. Perhaps it's not that more people are becoming computer scientists but that more people are finding non-academic ways to relate to programming language design. I think what Butterick did was to build the tool he needed to do a job (write a book). So language design becomes just like any other form of hacking.

>Why wouldn't the author qualify as a self taught computer scientist though?

Butterick himself is adamant that he is a lay person. He compares himself to a "squirrel in a ferrari": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMz09jYOgoc And that's his point in that talk - Racket makes it possible for even the lay person to build the language they need.

He can view himself however he wants, but the man just wrote an article that competently covers Turing completeness, regular expressions, and Lindemeyer trees, among other things! He's definitely earned his comp sci merit badge, so to speak.

Computer science is a specific treatment of these topics that is based in formalism. Compare John McCarthy's "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I" and Paul Graham's "The Roots of Lisp". These papers cover exactly the same material. But only the first is computer science because it uses a formal language to express the ideas.

If that's the definition of CS we're using then my original post is a very egregious misnomer. I feel like that definition is way too restrictive though. CS can be formalized and informal, but both are still CS IMO.

Languages designed by academic computer scientists are less used in the real world than languages designed outside of academia. It seems that academic computer science does not often lead to the design of languages that are actually chosen by working programmers to solve their problems.

I think there are some very interesting and elegant ideas in some languages that come from academia but it seems that something is missing when it comes to designing languages that are actually widely adopted. Despite their elegance Haskell and Racket are much less used than Go and Java.

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