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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

No mention of Hoare triples, predicate transformers, loop invariants, or any of the other formal machinery that was discovered 50 years ago and thoroughly solves the problem. The author means well, but this is completely uninformative.

Dijkstra was trained as a Mathematical Engineer for example. Fact is, if astronomers had the mindset of most programmers, they'd call their field Telescope Science.

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> Dijkstra was trained as a Mathematical Engineer for example.

"Mathematical engineering" looks like a modern invention. In any case, his undergraduate degree was in physics.

Dijkstra appears to have thought otherwise: "I worked at the time at the Department of Mathematics of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and told at that conference that the official academic title our graduates earned was 'Mathematical Engineer', and most of the Americans began to laugh, because for them it sounded as a contradiction in terms, mathematics being sophisticated and unpractical, engineering being straightforward and practical."[1]

Before quibbling, note I said he was trained as a Mathematical Engineer, not that he had a degree in Mathematical Engineering.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/E...

Not so modern an invention then. Thanks for the pointer.

(Anyway, participating in the training of "mathematical engineers" and being trained as one are not necessarily the same thing.)

I've heard this analogy several times, but I've never met an astronomer who didn't know how a telescope works.

That analogy would only make sense if you built the universe inside the telescope.

No: telescopes are tools to study the universe, just as computers are tools for studying computation.

I don't look at computers as tools for studying computation. Instead, they are tools for performing computation.

perhaps performing computations is to studying computation as observing the universe through a telescope is to studying it.

> perhaps performing computations is to studying computation as observing the universe through a telescope is to studying it.

This is an interesting thought, but the two seem fundamentally different in nature (active vs passive).

Yes, and to a certain extent, you can study computation without a digital computer. Computation can be abstracted away from the devices that perform it. You can, for example, study Big O notation and theoretical computational complexity of algorithms without actually using a computer.

"A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build." - Fred Brooks

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