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0 pointsonedev12y ago0 comments

That last bit sounds amazing and highly valuable. I go to a well regarded top CS school and I regret that we don't have something like that in our curriculum that forces people to write multi-thousand-lines of code with a team and maintain it.

Our EE program has something like that where you choose a team and build something with them over the course of a semester while having an "advisor". At the end you make a report and present it to the advisor and the rest of the committee. It's a requirement for graduation. I think that's awesome and CS definitely needs something akin to that.

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jeremysmyth12y ago

Science != engineering.

Engineers take what scientists discover and create and design solutions based on that. Computer science is not about engineering a large software solution. Rather it's about discovering and creating algorithms and techniques that engineers can use to design solutions.

Much of the comments to this article seem to be happy to mix the roles of "technician", "engineer", and "scientist" when they are in fact very, very different.

c2312y ago

Your definition of engineering may have been appropriate around the time of the industrial revolution when an engineer was literally one who built steam engines, but modern engineering in the academic sense under discussion here is absolutely a science.

tjr12y ago

Wikipedia describes "computer science" as an umbrella term covering everything pertaining to software development and algorithmic thought. Academic computer science programs generally offer courses in both the theoretical and the applied.

Even the very term itself has often been described as a misnomer, not necessarily having anything to do with "computers" or with "science".

I think the reason people mix such things around so much is because what "computer science" is has been ambiguously defined all along.

randomsearch12y ago

The truth is, CS is not a "science" like biology or physics.

It is an education in understanding computation and software development.

I'd also argue it is not an engineering discipline either. It's unfortunate the terms "Computer Science" and "Software Engineering" were ever accepted. They're holding us back; we're stuck in an outdated view of the subject.

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LinaLauneBaer12y ago

There are certain aspects of engineering which are definitely science. Science really is just the production of new knowledge with hard facts.

walshemj12y ago

Engineers are Scientists with thumbs was what I was told when I worked for a RnD organization on CIT's campus.

The corollary to that is "but the technician is the one who really understands it :-) "

collyw12y ago

My job as a software engineer involves a mix of all these things. Not a lot of heavy algorithm development, but definitely some.

mcginleyr112y ago

Engineering utilizes science. But not many engineers need to know as much as Knuth.

onedevOP12y ago

Hm that's a fair point.

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