

Is Web Development Computer Science? - AlfredTwo
http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2009/12/10/web-development-or-computer-science.aspx

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dkersten
From Wikipedia:

 _Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical
foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for
their implementation and application in computer systems._

So software development (and therefore Web Development) is not, in itself,
computer science, but builds on computer science concepts and findings
(theory, algorithms, etc).

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camccann
Web development is a subset of "software engineering".

Computer science is not software engineering. It also is not a science and,
arguably, is not really about computers.

Software engineering isn't really much of an engineering profession, for that
matter.

Grumble.

~~~
tybris
Computer Science is just science at the start. We know a couple of things like
Shannon's theorem and Amdahl's law, but that's about it. Unfortunately a lot
of experimental computer engineering is also being sold as computer science.

~~~
camccann
"Science" is, loosely speaking, a process for formulating and evaluating
predictive models of the behavior of systems with unknown characteristics,
based on empirical observation.

Theoretical "computer science" is, most of the time, a matter of building
abstractions from smaller concepts and making analytical, not empirical,
observations of the characteristics of those abstractions. This is much closer
to what is generally thought of as "abstract mathematics".

The closest you're likely to get to scientific methodology when programming is
when you have to write test code to figure out what the crap this freaking
third-party library you're stuck with is actually doing because clearly it
isn't what the documentation says it should and... at which point we've moved
away from "computer science" and into why "software engineering" is such an
embarrassment compared to real engineering disciplines.

If you want to hear someone smarter than myself expound similar ideas, look up
some of E. W. Dijkstra's work--the man was a genius, a "computer scientist"
_par excellence_ , and he expected software engineers to act like engineers.

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milkshakes
_Sure there are self taught people who do great things but having a good solid
base of computer science knowledge would seem to be a big edge for learning
the new technologies._

I don't understand -- To me, the premise of this article seems to be that
these are two different (mutually exclusive) types of programmers. I don't
think anyone here would subscribe to that tenuous assertion.

~~~
gaius
They're not mutually exclusive, but very few astronomers grind their own
lenses.

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KevinMS
Web development is almost all "construction", which has little to do with
computer science. Look it up in Code Complete.

I've worked in web development for many years, doing some pretty complicated
stuff, and I've never needed to remember how to do a bubble sort.

In other news, Ben & Jerry recommend a quart of ice cream a day.

~~~
megaman821
Other than an academic exercises I have never had to write a sort in any
language I have used. But know what does involve computer science, knowing
what type of pre-written sort to apply to your problem based on time and
memory constraints. Or knowing the performance characteristics of different
key/value stores on a specific data set.

Saying web development is just construction is crazy. Maybe for some brochure-
ware sites it is, but not for ebay, amazon, google, etc.. It is like saying
building a sky scraper is just construction, just like building a dog house.

~~~
eru
Why is sorting cited as _the_ computer science problem?

There's a lot to be learned about the boundaries between P and NP. For example
find polynomial algorithms for linear optimization. Or it would be nice to
know, if randomization --- which helps in practice [0] --- really does help in
theory, too.

[0] E.g. a quicksort that selects a pivot at random.

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olsonjeffery
The article's title itself poses a single question. But really, this article
is about two separate, but related, issues:

1\. Does a Web Developer benefit from as educational grounding in the Computer
Sciences? 2\. Are Web Developers (and by extension Software Engineers) by
their very nature _also_ Computer Scientists?

The first question is pretty straightforward to answer. Of course they do. The
second one isn't so obvious, though. Furthermore, your interpretation of the
"right" answer is going to be colored by your own educational background and
experiences with others in the course of your respective academic/commercial
career.

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mattezell
I really didn't find this particular query to be odd at all. From the subject
being searched, I can only infer that this is a person who is neither web
developer nor a programmer. It would seem a logical leap to presume this is a
current or soon to be college student curious about what all of these terms
actually mean in relation to what they want to do.

I know that while I was in school I was(and still at times) confused about
what it all meant - IT, CS, Web Dev, Software Engineering... Although this
searcher will likely start to become more comfortable with all of these terms
and disciplines as well as begin to understand how they relate and how they
differ, it is a bit daunting when you first start out to identify what term
actually describes what it is that you actually want to do.

MIS, CS, IT, Web Design, Software Engineering - college programs, that
although may describe the overarching discipline, don't really fully represent
what niche in the technical industry they serve to address... For example, I
have a BSCS, though by far the majority of my project involvement has been
done with back end web application development using established frameworks
and site design on top of mature platforms - little "Computer Science" being
done here (in the 'study of the theory of...' sense).

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jbhelms
I think if you consider a plain old HTML page as Web Development then fine, it
is not Computer Science. I consider that Web Design. To me Web Development is
making robust applications that can do more then display markup. All the back-
end stuff is what makes it an application, and in turn makes it computer
science.

~~~
dangrossman
But computer science isn't about building applications.

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vgurgov
Web dev is SE and not CS because nobody code websites on Turing machines, and
according to CS theorem all programing langs are equal so in theory you can do
that:)

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tybris
This fellow shouldn't call himself a computer science teacher, that's a
completely different subject. He's a computing teacher.

