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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

The theories behind computer science have little very application in large software engineering.

software engineering != computer science

That's preposterous. Computer science is directly applicable to understanding issues of scalability, searching, hashing, database properties, network routes and looping, the list goes on and on.

Computer science is a lot more than proofs.

None of those things deal with maintainability, design by contract, interface design, etc.

When you're writing a multi-million dollar piece of software (20+ man-years), the technical problems are the easy ones to solve. Actually putting the thing together is the hard part.

Well said. Computer Engineering is a lot more than programming languages. But does it take a college education to get there? Or a seminar on the latest tool chain.

Hell, software engineering isn't even engineering.

'you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.".'

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036...

"Software engineering" has little to do with engineering and its principles and everything with applying buzzwords to squeeze the most money out of whomever was suckered into paying for the project.

The theories behind computer science are used all the time in large software engineering. They're just not the interesting part.

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