> Doyle, > Please explain then in a scientific and or philosophical manner what > makes CS lowly? Compared to say mathematics.
CS (Computer Science) is certainly not lowly compared to math. I'd argue that today it is a much more useful subject than most areas of math. My original point was that it takes significantly less effort to "learn CS" than any other advanced field of knowledge. I personally know one person who had a college degree in chinese literature, who went on to learn programming with the help of nothing more than an Internet connection and a half-dozen books and then worked as a (very competent) systems engineer at a large multinational telecomm company. There are extremely interesting (and well-cited according to Google Scholar) technical publications in CS on such topics as "the statistical distribution of file-sizes on the Internet", "user behavior in Internet search". Here's one example: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/13891286/2000/00000033/00000001/art00031 CS is a lot more democratic than most other areas but as an unavoidable side-effect there is also a lot of poor-quality work in CS. I think CSers need to be commended for keeping their area relatively open and accessible. --Raghu.
