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Comment by actually_a_dog | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a little OT, but, I'd rather it be called "computing science." Computers are just the tool. I believe it was Dijkstra who famously objected to it being called "computer science," because they don't call astronomy "telescope science," or something to that effect.

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Peter Naur agreed with that which is why it is called "Datalogi" in Denmark and Sweden, his English term Datalogy never really caught on though. He wrote it in a letter to the editor in 1966 and it has pretty much been used since then here as Naur founded the first Datalogy university faculty a few years later.

This also lead to a strange naming now we have data science as well where it is called "Data videnskab" which is just a literal translation of the English term.

[0]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365719.366510 (sadly behind a wall)

informatics may be the closest english analogue. incidentally also what computer science is called in german (informatik)

> incidentally also what computer science is called in german (informatik)

Computerwissenschaften (literally computer science) exists, too, but it's the less common word.

> his English term Datalogy never really caught on though

Perhaps because no one had any idea about how it would be pronounced?

In Portuguese it's called "Ciência da Computação" (computing science or science of computation).

I never thought about this, but it's right. However, to get more nitpicky, most of the uses of "Comput[er|ing] Science" should be replaced with "Computer Engineering" anyway. If you are building something for a company, you are doing engineering, not science research

Be careful there. If you start calling what you're doing 'engineering', people will want you to know statics, dynamics, and thermodynamics.

The average developer isn't often doing "engineering". Until we have actual standards and a certification process, "engineer[ing]" doesn't mean anything.

The average software developer doesn't even know much math.

Right now, "software engineer" basically means "has a computer, -perhaps- knows a little bit about what goes on under the hood".

I'm not talking about the "average developer", I'm talking about college graduates having a "Computer Science" degreee but in practice being "Computer engineers"

College degrees aren't standardized and most of the time don't really mean anything. Ask some TAs for computer science courses about how confident they are in undergrads' ability to code.

There isn't a standard license that show that someone is proficient in security, or accessibility, or even in how computer hardware or networking work at a basic level.

So all we're doing is diluting the term "engineer", so as to not mean anything.

The only thing the term "software engineer" practically means is: they have a computer. It's meaningless, just a vanity title meant to sound better than "developer".

IfSmith

> The average software developer doesn't even know much math.

Well, I know stupid amounts of math compared to the average developer I've encountered, since I studied math in grad school. Other than basic graph traversal, I only remember one or two times I've gotten to actually use much of it.

Engineering is something like “deliberately configuring a physical or technological process to achieve some intended effect”. That applies whether you’re building a bridge or writing fizzbuzz

All my job titles have been of the form Software Engineer plus a modifier.

I believe they are referring to what the degree currently known as Computer Science should be called.

Yes. Specifically, it's referring to what the academic discipline ought to be called.

Incidentally, I don't think I know any SWEs who actually majored in software engineering. I know one who didn't even bother to graduate high school and therefore has no academic credential whatsoever, a couple of music majors, a few math majors, and a lot of "computer science" majors, but I can't think of anyone who actually got a "software engineering" bachelor's degree. Hell, I even know one guy with a JD. I think I know 1 or 2 who have master's degrees in "software engineering," but that's it.

I agree. I can't find it right now, but there was an article on HN within the past few days talking about how software engineering is often more like writing and editing a book than engineering. That makes perfect sense to me. Code should be meant primarily to communicate with people, and only incidentally to give instructions to computers. It seems to be lost to the sands of time who said this first, but it is certainly true that code is read by humans many more times than it is written. Therefore, ceteris paribus, we should optimize for readability.

Readable code is often simple code, as well. This also has practical benefits. Kernighan's law[0] states:

> Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

Dijkstra says it this way:

> The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.[1]

Knuth has a well-documented preference for "re-editable" code over reusable code. Being "re-editable" implies that the code must be readable and understandable (i.e. communicate its intention well to any future editors), if not simple.

I know that I have sometimes had difficulty debugging overly clever code. I am not inclined to disagree with the giants on this one.

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[0]: https://www.defprogramming.com/q/188353f216dd/

[1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/E...

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