Ask HN: What are lesser known / taught subfields of Computer Science? - entha_saava
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giantg2
Stenography comes to mind. It seems it just gets mentioned in cryptography
classes. Not sure that's very useful though.

I think machine learning is not taught enough relative to it's growing demand.

COBOL is a language that is still used in many places and will need people to
replace those who are retiring, so I feel that is lesser known and not taught
in many places.

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diehunde
Some I can think of:

\- Automata theory

\- Complexity theory (P vs NP stuff, not the one from leetcode problems)

\- Verification

\- Optimization using stuff like genetic algorithms, ant-colony algorithms,
particle swarm, simulated annealing, etc. Not sure how to call that area. In
my case it was an AI course.

\- Fuzzy logic

\- Scientific computing and Numerical analysis (CFD, finite elements, etc)

\- Information theory

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kingkongjaffa
> \- Scientific computing and Numerical analysis (CFD, finite elements, etc)

Yes please, if we could have more software engineers working on
mechanical/aeronautical/civil/<physical> engineering tools that would be
great.

Currently the state of the art takes a long time to get out of PHDs and into
industry, and when it does it is in the hands of a few companies that sell
expensive software licenses.

The likes of at Ansys, Siemens (NX), CD-adapco,

You can access FOSS tools like open-foam but the average engineer doesn't have
the skillset to also wrangle the tool as well as their domain problem.

An area I was always fascinated with but never had chance to dig into it was
topology optimization to generate structures (or flow paths) to accomodate
some given boundaries and physics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology_optimization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology_optimization)

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diehunde
> Yes please, if we could have more software engineers working on
> mechanical/aeronautical/civil/<physical> engineering tools that would be
> great.

That was my favorite subject in college and I wanted to pursue that area but
sadly we didn't have any experts in the CS department. All of them were from
the Mechanical Engineering department and they were extremely disconnected.

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RNeff
Program verification. How to design and implement correct programs.

