
Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science - ssp
http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/eecs-difference-explained
======
blackguardx
Hardware solutions can be quite beautiful in their simplicity. HP's first
product was a precision oscillator. To get the necessary precision, they
needed a negative feedback mechanism to stabilize their oscillation circuit.
They used a lightbulb. As the circuit drew more current, the lightbulb element
heated up, causing its resistance to go up and thus acting to reduce the
current through the circuit.

~~~
chronomex
Using a light bulb as a non-linear element in a circuit dates back at least to
Western Electric and its 1915-era Panel switch:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel_switch>

(By the way, if you're near Seattle, interested in electronics and history,
and can spare a Tuesday morning, you might enjoy going to visit the Museum of
Communications in Georgetown: <http://www.museumofcommunications.org/> . I
volunteer there when school's not in session.)

~~~
stcredzero
I believe some audio compressors work like this.

------
endtime
This is just zero-insight flamebait.

~~~
drats
Exactly this is stooping incredibly low. Here's a different story: A king
called an electrical engineer and a computer scientist together and gave them
a task best suited to an electrical engineer (something which the computer
scientist very well realized). He then tried to execute the computer scientist
for the inferior design. But the computer scientist ran away and started a
search engine and provided people with cryptography. These helped in getting
information to the people who realized that being ruled by a king who executes
people is stupid so they overthrew him and built a democracy of entrepreneurs
where engineers and computer scientists worked together on cool products for
the mutual gain of all. It was a vibrant society with free speech, which
unfortunately meant there were a lot of stupid Internet trolls who had to be
ignored. Luckily computer scientists designed systems of information
aggregation where the trolls could be downvoted from serious forums of
discussion. Unfortunately those left without the power to downvote had to try
to find amusing ways to get other people to do it.

~~~
michaelneale
Hold on a minute - that isn't fair. I am an Elec Eng who works in CS. Had to
go back and learn stuff (who doesn't). And I can't blame the king for
executing a CS for bad inheritance based OO design.

------
psyklic
This is not a good example of the two professions. Give the CS person hardware
constraints, and he or she would design an equally good system.

\+ Both people here are fundamentally asked to solve a hardware problem. Of
course the CS person does not know how to design complicated hardware, so of
course he or she will just stick in an arduino and write code ...

\+ The CS person easily also could have said "it's a toaster" and then would
have an almost identical solution to the EE (or vice versa). Keep in mind that
EEs are limited because of manufacturing expenses ... again, we seem to be
penalizing the CS majors because they would ignore hardware manufacturing
costs!

\+ Hardware is redesigned every few years to accommodate needs, just as
software is.

~~~
blackguardx
EEs write code too.

~~~
Locke1689
I've always been a little interested in this. How competent are EEs at general
programming? This is a serious question -- the only EEs I know that program
wrote some really crappy assembly code for a robotics project I helped on
(don't even get me started on their C).

~~~
adityakothadiya
I'm a EE in a day job. I design processors. I write programs in hardware
descriptive languages such as Verilog and Object Oriented languages such as
SystemVerilog. I write Perl, Shell scripts too.

Every day, I write code.

I build websites in the part-time too. I write all PHP, CSS, MySQL, Javascript
on my own, and build beautiful websites like <http://shopalize.com>.

Every night, I write code too.

So trust me, we're competent.

~~~
stcredzero
_So trust me, we're lot competent._

Ironically, this needs editing.

~~~
plinkplonk
" > So trust me, we're lot competent.

Ironically, this needs editing."

Agreed ( I didn't say it) but so does this

"I saw some EE student C code once"

(from your earlier comment) ;-)

~~~
stcredzero
Sorry, but that's a valid sentence. Thanks for displaying your, "lot
competent."

~~~
plinkplonk
You say "I saw some EE student C code once" is grammatical?

How about "I saw some American woman English speak once"? ;-)

I wonder who is "lot competent" here!

Look, it is all right to make minor mistakes in grammar, especially if you are
not a native speaker (the "lot comment" guy seemed Indian).

I was just pointing out your hypocrisy in using that as a marker of competence
and ask for editing, when you write more ill structured sentences yourself. He
who would be a Grammar Nazi should first write grammatically correct
sentences.

Relax and let live.

~~~
stcredzero

        You say "I saw some EE student C code once" is grammatical?
        How about "I saw some American woman English speak once"? ;-)
        I wonder who is "lot competent" here!
    

Your example is wrong because "code" in my sentence is a noun, not a verb as
you assumed.

Is English your 1st language? Thanks for showing us more "lot competent."

Hint, if you're wrong, but mistakenly try to come back and tell me I'm wrong,
I'm going to let you have it with both barrels.

~~~
ErrantX
You are wrong, as it happens - if not strictly (though I am not sure it _is_
strictly correct) then in usual use.

EDIT: if you're using it as a noun, by the way, you are wrong - I think
student needs to be possessive. e.g.

"I saw some EE students C code once"

But that's immaterial - _why are we attacking people's grammar_. It's
irrelevant to the discussion!

~~~
plinkplonk
"if your'e using it as a noun, by the way, you are wrong - I think student
needs to be possessive."

Exactly. And you need an apostrophe to indicate that if you want your readers
to parse the sentence properly.

"I saw an EE student's C Code once" (student is singular) or " I saw some EE
students' C code once" (students are plural). I've seen some grammar books
recommend an extra s anyway for the latter case as in "I saw some students's C
code once" though I suspect that is unused these days. [1]

"why are we attacking people's grammar. It's irrelevant to the discussion!"

This.

Speaking or writing 100% grammatically correct English (assuming such a beast
exists, which is a separate discussion) or making a typo here and there is
irrelevant to someone's competence as a programmer.

Using minor grammatical errors to judge people as incompetent is, at the
least, foolish.

I don't think strcredzero is incompetent because he missed an apostrophe or
wrote an ill formed sentence. But by the same token I don't think Aditya is
incompetent as a programmer (which was the topic under discussion btw - EE
students being good programmers or not) just because he said "lot competent".
Give the guy a break.

[1] From Strunk's "Elements of Style"

"Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's.

Follow this rule whatever the final consonant. Thus write,

Charles's friend Burns's poems the witch's malice

This is the usage of the United States Government Printing Office and of the
Oxford University Press."

~~~
stcredzero
Who ever said anyone was a bad programmer? This is the same irony as the
"qualaty" initiative from Dilbert. At that point it was an ironic and relevant
quip. It's you guys that turned it into ego bashing -- while displaying
grammatical incompetence even as you incorrectly criticize my grammar.

Incidentally you're still wrong. Ambiguously parse-able English sentences are
still grammatically correct if one of the possibilities is correct.

Oh, and you assumed student was a noun when it's an adjective in your
analysis. Sheesh! Is English your 1st language? "Student code" where student
is a noun acting as adjective is a commonly accepted pattern of use in North
America and Britain.

~~~
plinkplonk
"you assumed student was a noun when it's an adjective in your analysis.
Sheesh! "

Well that reflects on how well you structure your sentences as a writer
doesn't it?

Why take the attitude of "my sentence looks completely ill structured but it
has multiple possible parses and I know _one_ of them is right and I leave you
to figure out which one vs writing clearly in the first place and meanwhile
I'll "ironically quip" on some other fellow's minor errors vs sticking to the
argument at hand"?

"Is English your 1st language?"

I already said it wasn't. And I don't need to have it as my first language to
show you your sentence structure is sucky. Everyone who has English as a first
language doesn't write it well. Conversely some people who have English as a
their n-th language speak or write well. So what?

" "Student code" where student is a noun acting as adjective is a commonly
accepted pattern of use in North America and Britain."

And "lot competent" is Indian English. again, so what? Who said adherence to
"North American English" is the metric of programming competence of EE
students (which was what Aditya was talking about) and you explicitly pointed
his sentence as "ironic"?

I quote

"Aditya:- So trust me, we're lot competent.

StrcredZero: Ironically, this needs editing.""

It is hard to read your "ironically" as anything other than "you are not as
competent as you claim and your sentence structure reveals it" . What was the
"irony" here?

Bigotry and irony are different.

But, whatever, I tire of this bickering and this thread is overlong. I rest my
case and yield you the field and the (dubious) victory! [Exit thread]

~~~
stcredzero
_It is hard to read your "ironically" as anything other than "you are not as
competent as you claim and your sentence structure reveals it" . What was the
"irony" here?_

Apparently you have a penchant for jumping to conclusions, then behaving
defensively when your shortcomings are pointed out. Thanks for revealing
yourself so cheaply and easily.

------
jmtame
"this looks like something i've seen before. i can get you a better one by
tomorrow." mark it up by a factor of 2 to buy a toaster someone else built and
sell it for profit. assure the king you can massively produce the toasters,
but you must retain the licensing rights to sell to other countries. you buy
the rights to the toaster and make millions.

------
ErrantX
As an engineer; the engineering solition presented here is very poor. It
ignores the problem domain almost entirely and focuses on only one minor (and
hard to quantify) variable.

The cs solution is banal too - but it appears thisis down to the writers bias.

~~~
stcredzero
Lots of assumptions are being made that might not apply to the kingdom. No one
asks if people want toast done on one side or both. Does everyone even have
electricity? The best solution might even be wire racks to put over gas
burners.

------
tsally
Software "engineering" != CS. I know Greenspun knows that, and I know the CS
label is just for the purposes of the joke, but still. Java has already been
harmful enough to CS. :-p

~~~
ssp
Greenspun didn't write it, he just posted it on his website.

~~~
basugasu
The earliest I can trace it back to is this post to comp.lang.ada in 1994:

[http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ada/msg/7a96d45d5cc...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ada/msg/7a96d45d5ccc1ea3)

I like how he opens with "I felt like wasting bandwidth" so here's a funny
story. Little could he imagine it would become #1 link on Hacker News, 15
years later :-)

------
CamperBob
I'm a software guy, and I'd just use a bimetallic-strip thermostat with an
adjustable spring, whose tension is controlled by the knob.

Off to the patent office...

