

The identity crisis in Computer Science - eerpini
http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/essay.cs.identity.crisis.html

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ggchappell
This is a nice essay.

However, the page does not seem to be intended to be linked to directly, as it
is missing some vital context. In particular, the author is apparently Douglas
E. Comer, a professor of computer science at Purdue. I can't tell when it was
written, but it does mention the iPhone, so it's not too awfully old.

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One paragraph in the essay worries me a bit.

> Discard the idea that “thinking about computing” in the abstract is somehow
> more prestigious than “thinking about novel ways to design and build
> computing systems”.

Strictly speaking, I agree, but I get the sense from the rest of that
paragraph that he wants to take things too far: that his solution to the
mathematicians vs. engineers face-off is "let the engineers win". But I think
that a great strength of C.S. is the short path we have from theory to
practice. We can take crazy-abstract stuff like category-theoretic-based
typing or the number theory behind modern encryption, and design production
systems based on them.

So, yes, he is right that, if we didn't have the engineers, then none of the
wonderful computing stuff out there would exist. But if we didn't have the
mathematicians, then so many subfields (encryption, authentication,
compression, typing, optimization, compiler design, search ranking, ...) would
be dead in the water. We'd be tossing around raw bitmaps using tweaked
versions of Fortran IV, and hoping fervently that no one intercepts our
network packets. (Or, more likely, something even worse.) Let's acknowledge
that we need both kinds of people.

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denzil_correa
The identity crisis is aggravated due to "textbook" view points about Computer
Science. Here's some which I have heard. Others may add more.

CS is a [1] branch of EE [2] branch of Mathematics [3] is not the real deal
for research

