Hacker News Reader

Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

Can someone point out where the science in all this is? At best, there are some courses in algorithms in the 'Core Theory' and others in the 'Advanced Theory' section, with a random spattering of in other sections.

Computer Science would be computational theory, complexity theory, a proof based cryptography course, the mathematics of computer geometry/machine learning type stuff.

About 80% of the courses here are software engineering courses - about using computers to build things. The quote 'computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes', comes to mind.

Just call it 'a self-taught education in Software Engineering'.

View on HN

That ship has sailed a long time ago. "Computer Science" today means basically any topic vaguely related to computers. You can get a "Computer Science" degree by focusing on design theoretical type systems, designing CPUs, designing business processes or designing user interfaces. I think it's fair to say that we've lost this battle.

Ironically, pretty much the only subfield of computer science using the scientific method in any significant capacity is software engineering.

Historically and foundationally CS is a child of mathematics and electrical engineering, neither of which really fit the narrow English term of science.

CS is mostly preoccupied with a) making (useful) deductions in closed logical systems, and b) building cool shit. Empirical knowledge generation is usually only relevant as a tool to help us with the first two goals.

Yes, a lot of CS is mathematics (and EE), but it is not just that.

There is a notion of experimentation in pure CS, because CS asks the question, what can be computed on physical machines. And to check that, you actually need to build and check.

Nothing illustrates this better than Quantum Computing. Computer Science (and Physics) theories predict the existence of quantum computing, and suggest a computational advantage, but we will never know unless we build QCs and experiment.

The situation isn't any better at universities. Even at the top-10 universities you can get a "computer science" degree taking at most the standard discrete math + algorithms courses. (And not to mention, there's apparently even one university where you get to call yourself an "electrical engineer" without even touching signal processing or anything more advanced than RLC circuits.)

Correct, and I criticize them too. But universities do it because they presumably want to cash in on the prestige of associating the degree with 'science'.

A standalone course, which presumably comes from the ethos of rejecting degree-based education, is completely free to call a spade a spade.

My master's course only accepted students whose bachelor degree included a minimum amount of credits in mathematics.

All of the computer-whatever bachelors from around the world are not allowed to sign up for it.

I forget what lecture it was but Feynman thought the idea of "computer science" as a bit bogus and that it is really all computer engineering.

To me, it is that at our core we are a society of marketing bullshitters. The vast majority of daily activity is marketing falsity as truth to each other in basically all context.

The secret is real mathematicians snicker at CS faculty people behind their backs. =)

The other secret is CS faculty don't care because if they wanted to study math they'd have gotten a math PhD instead of a CS one. =)

EEs do both, but they’re not laughing at anybody because they’re too busy getting the job done

but do they do "both" well... generally not. =)

Well the ones I’ve worked with were all pretty damn good…

Depends... some are like getting software people to build a vehicular bridge. =)

Who bets against mathematics loses, almost always. While that is true, CS people also snicker at mathematicians, because they usually are not able to write good and readable code, unless they also have significant outside of math coding background, which they usually do not.

> The quote 'computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes', comes to mind.

Astronomy isn't called "Telescope Science" though..

Theres a quote somewhere that any field with "Science" in it, is probably not actually a science.

That sounds like how much cs degrees are from what I have seen

looks like they have some of that in the advanced theory section

Reply on news.ycombinator.com