4 ms·

"Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail." - Luciano Pavarotti

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
EWD pioneered or refined on so many aspects of concurrency, multitasking, distributed computing and imperative programming that are taken for granted today, while scantly using computers in general. Wrote a multitasking OS on paper two years before he ever got the chance to implement it on real hardware. In fact, doing computer science or theory of programming without a computer was remarkably common due to scarce access to hardware, even as recently as the late 80s with people writing BASIC programs on paper before ever getting access to a PC. I'm sure it still happens. I actually think that teaching CS and programming as hard pragmatic subjects based on doing real-world programming, is likely harmful. The impedance mismatch between contemporary, enormously complicated software systems with the theoretical essentials are too great and may lead to the risk of being unable to think sufficiently abstractly. That is to say, the risk of associating one implementation of a name with the actual first principles of the name in question. See: People being baffled by Plan 9 because they associate "file" as something more specific than a tree node, or generic representation of data.
teraflop 11y ago
On the other hand, you don't need to hire a cast and crew to be a playwright.
Someone 11y ago
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." (Attributed to) Dijkstra. "Computer science isn't a science and it isn't about computers" (www.jonahkagan.me/projects/writing/cs-essay.html, but I think that isn't the original) You can learn music without ever touching an instrument, but you can't learn playing an instrument that way. Similarly, learning computer science is not the same thing as learning to program or learning software engineering.
- tyrust 11y ago
  >"Computer science isn't a science and it isn't about computers" Earliest use of this quote that I know of is from Abelson in his 1986 lecture teaching SICP: https://youtu.be/2Op3QLzMgSY?t=24 https://youtu.be/2Op3QLzMgSY?t=24
  - amelius 11y ago
    Hence, we should call it "Information Technology" instead.
ctdonath 11y ago
“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”
knodi123 11y ago
"Sounds like there might be some money in that." - Hugh Hefner

EWD pioneered or refined on so many aspects of concurrency, multitasking, distributed computing and imperative programming that are taken for granted today, while scantly using computers in general. Wrote a multitasking OS on paper two years before he ever got the chance to implement it on real hardware. In fact, doing computer science or theory of programming without a computer was remarkably common due to scarce access to hardware, even as recently as the late 80s with people writing BASIC programs on paper before ever getting access to a PC. I'm sure it still happens. I actually think that teaching CS and programming as hard pragmatic subjects based on doing real-world programming, is likely harmful. The impedance mismatch between contemporary, enormously complicated software systems with the theoretical essentials are too great and may lead to the risk of being unable to think sufficiently abstractly. That is to say, the risk of associating one implementation of a name with the actual first principles of the name in question. See: People being baffled by Plan 9 because they associate "file" as something more specific than a tree node, or generic representation of data.

teraflop 11y ago

On the other hand, you don't need to hire a cast and crew to be a playwright.

Someone 11y ago

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." (Attributed to) Dijkstra. "Computer science isn't a science and it isn't about computers" (www.jonahkagan.me/projects/writing/cs-essay.html, but I think that isn't the original) You can learn music without ever touching an instrument, but you can't learn playing an instrument that way. Similarly, learning computer science is not the same thing as learning to program or learning software engineering.

tyrust 11y ago
>"Computer science isn't a science and it isn't about computers" Earliest use of this quote that I know of is from Abelson in his 1986 lecture teaching SICP: https://youtu.be/2Op3QLzMgSY?t=24 https://youtu.be/2Op3QLzMgSY?t=24
- amelius 11y ago
  Hence, we should call it "Information Technology" instead.

ctdonath 11y ago

“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”

knodi123 11y ago

"Sounds like there might be some money in that." - Hugh Hefner