begin quoting [EMAIL PROTECTED] as of Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 10:49:50AM -0700: > Interesting article and this is something I've been saying for a while. > There isn't a whole lot of science in computer science just not. Not > compared to something like bridge building. > > http://www.windley.com/archives/2006/02/alan_kay_is_com.shtml
Bridge-building is engineering, not science. The article points out that engineering predates science. >From the article... The basics are still mostly the same. If you go to most campuses, there is a single computer science department and the first course in computer science is almost indistinguishable from the first course in 1960. They\u2019re about data structures and algorithms despite the fact that almost nothing exciting about computing today has to do with data structures and algorithms. The first computer-science course is only about data structures and algorithms as an excuse. What's really being taught -- or should be -- is problem decomposition and preciseness of communication. But having a course titled "Thinking about problems and being a nitpicking git" wouldn't get many students, and the students would whine and complain about not learning anything useful anyway. I would be interested in finding out how introductory courses in other disciplines have changed in the past fifty years... The best way to get people to think is to destroy their current thinking. Hm. Is it, really? I thought that destroying someone's world-view was the first step in conscripting them into your cult. :) Preconceived notions are largely reactions to what vendors are saying. Yes. Don't believe the vendors. They have little incentive to tell the truth, except by accident. "American's have no past and no future, they live in an extended present." Bah. Apostrophe abuse. Get this writer an editor already. We're much better at building software systems than we are at predicting what they will do. There are no good models. If we were scientists, we'd be trying to build models. Yup! Part of the problems is that our models, while easier to analyze, are more difficult to build. Science helps us to be more reasonabler about reasoning. Um. More reasonabler? Alan uses John McCarthy and Lisp as an example of real science in computer science. He showed us that you can build a system that's also it's own metasystem. Ah... this article is lisp-wanking. Figures. The perversity of science is that world doesn't change just because we get a different perspective of it. Heh. I like that. The secret of PARC's success was to design the best virtual machine we could and then to build hardware that optimized that. We've got that concept backwards today. Fair point. -- Programs as prose, or poetry; do we want science or engineering? Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
