Let Go, Standard Library From Community

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Don Clugston wrote:

> Jascha Wetzel wrote:
>> hm, how about...
>> why is problem X undecidable?
>> why does solving problem Y take at least O(...) time/space?
>> why are some problems NP and others P or aren't they?
>> why do these weights and activation functions make a recursive neural
>> network X do what it does?
> 
> Agreed. Those are all mathematical, science questions. And the CS
> department at the university I went to, thought that was what they
> should be teaching. But there isn't really very much of it, and most of
> it was developed by regular mathematicians (Goedel, etc), without much
> connection to actual computers.
> 
>> "software engineering" is clearly a large subset, but you would have to
>> stretch the term pretty much to make most theoretical CS fit in there.
> 
> Yup. But theoretical CS is pretty much a specialised branch of
> mathematics, which I think is not how the CS term is generally used.

The algorithmic parts of CS is mostly math, yes. There's quite a bit of
software specific stuff though, like research into information systems and
the methodologies to build them. This is again closely related to software
engineering, in which research also is performed. Then you have the
hardware part of it (computers are equally much hardware as software). My
impression of those doing research at my university, was that they _are_
highly professional scientists, doing everything from exceptionally boring
stuff to exceptionally exciting stuff.

I do to some degree agree that for what we as students did, science is a
misnomer, and that is not a word used in the norwegian description of the
studies either. In Norwegian terms, I'm an engineer in what we call
datateknikk, meaning whatever means there are to treat data in a meaningful
way.

-- 
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource, #d.tango & #D: larsivi
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