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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

The analogy I usually make is that theoretical physics has more or less nothing to do with mechanical engineering in much the same way that computer science has more or less nothing to do with writing software for a living.

In both cases, it isn't done to trust the theoreticians with power tools: or hold the guys in the shop responsible for the deep magic, either.

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That duality is a few degree too far removed to map to CS->SE.

Alogrithms, & data structures are one of the obvious fully shared concerns between CS and SE.

Also, as a software practitioner, I can give you multiple examples of reaching into CS research and then directly appying it to code. A favorite ~recent example was discovering "Power of Two Choices" (for bins and balls) a few years ago, and then, that very day, doing a prototype of a cache using that approach. I seriously doubt a Mechanical Engineers would have the same experience with ~contemporary fundamental physics theoretical papers.

then punt the analogy back a century or so to a time when modern physics and it’s engineering equivalents were more in the same rough infancy that CS is in now. You’ll see a more equivalent cross-fertilization then, perhaps.

I don’t mean that as an insult, at all, just a recognition that as a field, CS is maybe 75 years old.

We're in agreement regarding the infancy of the field and how that manifests in practice.

I wouldn't take it as an insult, if I were a CS worker, however. That just means that the Gausses, Euclids, etc. of this field have yet to appear. All the warts of this field aside, it does offer a chance for making a dent in history. Something the young workers in the field may want to keep in mind ..

Tons of scientific papers on things like analyzing harmonics and material grain structure are rapidly adopted by mechanical engineers.

Comparing it to fundamental physics is like comparing it to abstract math — in which case the relationship is still the same:

Physicists building the LHC pushed engineering forward.

Math researchers have substantially pushed numerical computing forward.

You're conflating a few things -- it's not like mechE's don't have their own journals in which to publish scientific papers, after all.

It's merely that, to pick some famous names: what leslie lamport or simon peyton-jones or donald knuth do with their daily professional lives and output has a passing similarity with what titus winters or linus torvalds or raymond chen or .. have, but not much more than that. And both groups know stuff the the other one does not.

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