Alan Kay: Is Computer Science an Oxymoron? | Hacker News Reader

Alan Kay: Is Computer Science an Oxymoron?

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22 pointsparenthesis9 comments

Is anyone interested in Alan's point? He knows that computer science is a math. Computer science is to computer engineering (including programming) as theoretical physics is to experimental physics. The problem is that computer scientists haven't done anything relevant to 95% of computer engineering for decades, and computer engineers apparently stopped reading the computer scientists even before that.

"I'd like to welcome you to this course on Computer Science. Actually that's a terrible way to start. Computer science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, it's not a science. It might be engineering or it might be art. We'll actually see that computer so-called science actually has a lot in common with magic. We will see that in this course. So it's not a science. It's also not really very much about computers. And it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators. And biology is not really about microscopes and petri dishes. And it's not about computers in the same sense that geometry is not really about using a surveying instruments."

From Abelson in the first SICP lecture: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

“Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” - Dijkstra

"... but they don't call it telescope science." - unknown

Computer science is not a science. It is a math.

Science is the attempt to find counterexamples to disprove your ideas on how a given system behaves. It involves conducting experiments to give input data for constructing a model, and then trying to find corner cases that break the model and allow you to refine or otherwise rework your model until it accounts for all your data.

Computer science has none of this. Computer science is the art of coming up with definitions that are of use to solving certain classes of problems, with formalisms to back them up. That is math.

Sure math only allows deductive proofs but without induction how would people ever get to the proof? Mathematicians do hypothesises and experiments too. I'm sure mathematics is regarded as science.

Induction isn't the core of it. The idea is that you try to find counterexamples in science, and you don't have proofs in the general sense. Ever. The best you can say is that "If I guessed right, then I have math that worked out." Nothing more. Mathematics allows a definite "This is a solution that exists to this problem.". In Science, you can say that a solution exists to a problem, but that's not the tricky part -- the tricky part is figuring out the right problem to solve.

Science is effectively an attempt to reverse engineer the universe. Imagine that you were given a clock by a client. A very ornate clock that he doesn't want you to take apart. Then he tells you he wants you to make schematics for the clock so precise he could put together a precise functional duplicate. But you're not allowed to take it apart.

I would say that does not that count as mathematics, although mathematics would certainly have a use as a tool to prove that the behavior is correct in all observed respects. But you could probably find a new minute difference in the way the hand moves, and that would blast all your carefully crafted mathematics to bits.

I'm not slagging on mathematics, and I'm not trying to glorify science and say that one is a more powerful superset of the other.

They're both very useful and very tightly intertwined disciplines, but they're also very different. In a way, you could say that math is the study of solving problems, and science is the study of finding physically meaningful problems.

Mathematicians often use 'quasi-empirical' methods as a starting point (read from the new paragraph half-way down):

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jvrx-jIGbGoC&pg=PA67&...

"PowerPoint is a terrible idea because it takes everything interesting about what computers can do and brings it into an expensive form of paper. Alan now jumps into a demo of the system he’s using that isn’t PowerPoint. He draws a car and then animates it with a script. This is based on what children do with his system, Squeak. "

I found that tidbit interesting. The thing is, when you invent new things, you need some type of metaphor for what already exists, or people will have a hard time adopting it or using it.

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