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Comment by weej | Hacker News Reader

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - Edsger Dijkstra

Yes, then I had a computer science student who lost three years of work because he never made a backup of the files on his mac computer.

Learning nothing but theory can come back to bite you some times.

LOL. I had three graduate students (PHd CompSci candidates) working for me back at UMass. I come around the corner to see them all clustered around one of the PCs. Apparently one of the graduate students had slid a CD-ROM between two of the blanking panels instead of opening the CD-ROM tray. They were trying to figure out where the CD had gone.

After a chuckle, I showed them how to open the case and retrieve the CD.

That quote is misattributed and I also think it is not something Dijkstra would have said. Quite the opposite actually. However, I think this quote from him is much more beautiful:

In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind.

(Turing award lecture, 1972)

He did say it because I heard him say it. The sentence just before was: "Our field should be called 'Computing Science' rather than 'Computer Science.'"

In my language most university courses/majors are actually named like that. Common names: "Ciências da Computação": Computing Science "Engenharia Informática": (Informática is usually translated as computer or computing science, or just computing) CS Engineering Less common: "Ciencias dos Computadores": Computer Science "Engenharia Informática e Ciências dos Computadores": I bet you can translate this one

Dijkstra probably assumed that you would have the programming chops and language knowledge.

As our second best DBA did when I worked at BT - he had worked at NPL and Dijkstra was his boss

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