

The Computer “Scientist” as a Toolsmith [pdf] - prattbhatt
http://cs.unc.edu/xcms/wpfiles/toolsmith/The_Computer_Scientist_as_Toolsmith.pdf

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drwolf
Neat find. Interesting that it "First appeared in ... 1977".

Furthermore: "Computer scientists are in fact engineers of abstract objects
... we are toolsmiths building for others to use."

I along with several friends and family holding degrees in CS consistently run
into misunderstandings about what we do, can do, and are capable of doing.
Dijkstra is fabled to have said it best as "Computer Science is no more about
computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

~~~
ende
I disagree with Brooks, or rather he should speak for himself. What he says
here may be true for the sizable branch of computer science that is software
engineering, but most CS departments originally emerged out of mathematics
departments, and more practitioners in academia deal in theory and
experimentation than in building tools. The perception of computer science as
an engineering field probably stems from the glut of undergraduates that go
into industry as software engineers and thus represent the face of CS to most
of society. As a result, computer science as a field tends to straddle both
science and engineering. I don't think the author's attempt at redefinition
here makes any sense.

It's certainly understandable that confusion surrounds the term 'computer
science' though. It might be one of those cases where the name made sense when
it was at first mostly a theoretical field, but maybe it's time for
universities to start separating the engineering component into an actual
engineering department. 'Computer Engineering' is already taken, though
perhaps Software Engineering could be merged with it or placed into its own
department. Of course, institutional inertia is a heck of a force so good luck
with such reorganizations.

Is it really even useful to distinguish fields as engineering or science
though? I generally follow literature in two fields: computer science and
biology. In each field you'll find both methodology and domain application
papers. The former contributes tools for study, the later contributes the
result of study using tools. To put it another way, I know plenty of
'scientists' in biology, chemistry and physics who spend most of their time
engineering instrumentation, and I know plenty of 'engineers' in computer
science who spend most of their time conducting experiments and analyzing
observations.

In conclusion, I don't find the distinction useful.

