4 ms·

Spending all day studying something seems to encourage people to go out and do related things in their off time. And they get better at them. Do you really thi

Spending all day studying something seems to encourage people to go out and do related things in their off time. And they get better at them. Do you really think that the soft skill building activities are equally likely to be popular among the people you meet in a humanities class compared to one in a computer science class? And you also seem to be completely dismissing the ability of education to give you tools to better understand and contextualize situations you encounter in the real world. If you asked two students to try to understand a complex biological system and one was a computer science major and the other a philosophy major which do you think would do better? It's probably the one who has a lot of practice building models of abstract systems, even if they are of a type that's more squishy than they are used to. Now take those same two people and ask them to convince someone of something while knowing only a few things about them, the one who is used to thinking about various different belief systems and world views is going to find it much easier to identify with someone different from them.

wolfgke 11y ago
> Now take those same two people and ask them to convince someone of something while knowing only a few things about them, the one who is used to thinking about various different belief systems and world views is going to find it much easier to identify with someone different from them. Different paradigmas of programming (say, logical (Prolog), imperative, functional (Haskell), aspect-oriented, etc.) also represent various belief systems. The same can be said about nearly every aspect of computer science, say computer architecture (CISC vs. RISC, VLIW, superscalar vs. not superscalar, in-order vs. out-of-order, memory models (weak vs. strong) etc.), building blocks for algorithms (say, divide & conquer, dynamic programming, different kinds of tree data structures that make different runtime compromises, etc.), etc. So also in computer science you are confronted with lots of belief systems and world views.

wolfgke 11y ago

> Now take those same two people and ask them to convince someone of something while knowing only a few things about them, the one who is used to thinking about various different belief systems and world views is going to find it much easier to identify with someone different from them. Different paradigmas of programming (say, logical (Prolog), imperative, functional (Haskell), aspect-oriented, etc.) also represent various belief systems. The same can be said about nearly every aspect of computer science, say computer architecture (CISC vs. RISC, VLIW, superscalar vs. not superscalar, in-order vs. out-of-order, memory models (weak vs. strong) etc.), building blocks for algorithms (say, divide & conquer, dynamic programming, different kinds of tree data structures that make different runtime compromises, etc.), etc. So also in computer science you are confronted with lots of belief systems and world views.