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Out of curiosity, what is your definition of computer science?
by mattrepl 17y ago
Out of curiosity, what is your definition of computer science?
- Anon84 17y ago"Computer science is a funny thing for what we do. It's not a science, and it's not about computers." (I forget the author, but I believe it was someone at MIT)
- elcron 17y agoI think it was either Hal Abelson or Jerry Sussman in one of the SICP lectures. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
- moron4hire 17y agoDijkstra is often quoted (though no clue if he actually said it) with a similar expression "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
- Qz 17y agoCS tends to focus more on abstractions about data and algorithms, rather than the data specific to a particular field.
- scott_s 17y agoEverything concerned with computation in both the abstract and in implementation. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968013 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968013 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131606 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131606
- moron4hire 17y agoYes, as the others said, the study of different ways to compute. For example, from the article, "The Eyebrowse project is motivated, in part, by the fact that as researchers, we have no idea how people actually use the web." That's not about computation, that's human-computer interaction, which I think of more as applied psychology melded with graphic design. While there are opportunities to advance the field of analyzing large data sets, that's still more in the realm of advanced statistics than computation.