4 ms·

Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science

39 points by ssp 17y ago

blackguardx 17y ago
Hardware solutions can be quite beautiful in their simplicity. HP's first product was a precision oscillator. To get the necessary precision, they needed a negative feedback mechanism to stabilize their oscillation circuit. They used a lightbulb. As the circuit drew more current, the lightbulb element heated up, causing its resistance to go up and thus acting to reduce the current through the circuit.
- chronomex 17y ago
  Using a light bulb as a non-linear element in a circuit dates back at least to Western Electric and its 1915-era Panel switch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel_switch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel_switch (By the way, if you're near Seattle, interested in electronics and history, and can spare a Tuesday morning, you might enjoy going to visit the Museum of Communications in Georgetown: http://www.museumofcommunications.org/ http://www.museumofcommunications.org/ . I volunteer there when school's not in session.)
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    I believe some audio compressors work like this.
CamperBob 17y ago
I'm a software guy, and I'd just use a bimetallic-strip thermostat with an adjustable spring, whose tension is controlled by the knob. Off to the patent office...
psyklic 17y ago
This is not a good example of the two professions. Give the CS person hardware constraints, and he or she would design an equally good system. + Both people here are fundamentally asked to solve a hardware problem. Of course the CS person does not know how to design complicated hardware, so of course he or she will just stick in an arduino and write code ... + The CS person easily also could have said "it's a toaster" and then would have an almost identical solution to the EE (or vice versa). Keep in mind that EEs are limited because of manufacturing expenses ... again, we seem to be penalizing the CS majors because they would ignore hardware manufacturing costs! + Hardware is redesigned every few years to accommodate needs, just as software is.
- blackguardx 17y ago
  EEs write code too.
  - Locke1689 17y ago
    I've always been a little interested in this. How competent are EEs at general programming? This is a serious question -- the only EEs I know that program wrote some really crappy assembly code for a robotics project I helped on (don't even get me started on their C).
    - acgourley 17y ago
      They probably say the same thing about your circuit design
      - dagw 17y ago
        The difference being that circuit design isn't part of the CS curriculum and most programmers wouldn't claim to know circuit design.
        stcredzero 17y ago
        Actually, it is covered in some courses like "NAND to Tetris." It should be covered.
tsally 17y ago
Software "engineering" != CS. I know Greenspun knows that, and I know the CS label is just for the purposes of the joke, but still. Java has already been harmful enough to CS. :-p
- ssp 17y ago
  Greenspun didn't write it, he just posted it on his website.
  - basugasu 17y ago
    The earliest I can trace it back to is this post to comp.lang.ada in 1994: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ada/msg/7a96d45d5ccc1ea3 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ada/msg/7a96d45d5cc... I like how he opens with "I felt like wasting bandwidth" so here's a funny story. Little could he imagine it would become #1 link on Hacker News, 15 years later :-)
jmtame 17y ago
"this looks like something i've seen before. i can get you a better one by tomorrow." mark it up by a factor of 2 to buy a toaster someone else built and sell it for profit. assure the king you can massively produce the toasters, but you must retain the licensing rights to sell to other countries. you buy the rights to the toaster and make millions.
ErrantX 17y ago
As an engineer; the engineering solition presented here is very poor. It ignores the problem domain almost entirely and focuses on only one minor (and hard to quantify) variable. The cs solution is banal too - but it appears thisis down to the writers bias.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Lots of assumptions are being made that might not apply to the kingdom. No one asks if people want toast done on one side or both. Does everyone even have electricity? The best solution might even be wire racks to put over gas burners.
endtime 17y ago
This is just zero-insight flamebait.
- drats 17y ago
  Exactly this is stooping incredibly low. Here's a different story: A king called an electrical engineer and a computer scientist together and gave them a task best suited to an electrical engineer (something which the computer scientist very well realized). He then tried to execute the computer scientist for the inferior design. But the computer scientist ran away and started a search engine and provided people with cryptography. These helped in getting information to the people who realized that being ruled by a king who executes people is stupid so they overthrew him and built a democracy of entrepreneurs where engineers and computer scientists worked together on cool products for the mutual gain of all. It was a vibrant society with free speech, which unfortunately meant there were a lot of stupid Internet trolls who had to be ignored. Luckily computer scientists designed systems of information aggregation where the trolls could be downvoted from serious forums of discussion. Unfortunately those left without the power to downvote had to try to find amusing ways to get other people to do it.
  - michaelneale 17y ago
    Hold on a minute - that isn't fair. I am an Elec Eng who works in CS. Had to go back and learn stuff (who doesn't). And I can't blame the king for executing a CS for bad inheritance based OO design.
- huherto 17y ago
  We (CS or SE) do tend to do things more complicated than they should be. This has been recognized by many. There is a very interesting article (I think by Martin Fowler, but I can't find it ) about why you can make any aspect of software flexible. But you can't make every aspect flexible. Making one aspect flexible has the cost of increasing the complexity of the software; making every aspect flexible increases the complexity to the point where the software cannot be changed any more. There is also the YAGNI principle, which is clearly broken by the CS engineer on the king's story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aint_gonna_need_it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aint_gonna_need_it
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

39 points by ssp 17y ago

Hardware solutions can be quite beautiful in their simplicity. HP's first product was a precision oscillator. To get the necessary precision, they needed a negative feedback mechanism to stabilize their oscillation circuit. They used a lightbulb. As the circuit drew more current, the lightbulb element heated up, causing its resistance to go up and thus acting to reduce the current through the circuit.

chronomex 17y ago
Using a light bulb as a non-linear element in a circuit dates back at least to Western Electric and its 1915-era Panel switch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel_switch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel_switch (By the way, if you're near Seattle, interested in electronics and history, and can spare a Tuesday morning, you might enjoy going to visit the Museum of Communications in Georgetown: http://www.museumofcommunications.org/ http://www.museumofcommunications.org/ . I volunteer there when school's not in session.)
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- stcredzero 17y ago
  I believe some audio compressors work like this.

CamperBob 17y ago

I'm a software guy, and I'd just use a bimetallic-strip thermostat with an adjustable spring, whose tension is controlled by the knob. Off to the patent office...

psyklic 17y ago

This is not a good example of the two professions. Give the CS person hardware constraints, and he or she would design an equally good system. + Both people here are fundamentally asked to solve a hardware problem. Of course the CS person does not know how to design complicated hardware, so of course he or she will just stick in an arduino and write code ... + The CS person easily also could have said "it's a toaster" and then would have an almost identical solution to the EE (or vice versa). Keep in mind that EEs are limited because of manufacturing expenses ... again, we seem to be penalizing the CS majors because they would ignore hardware manufacturing costs! + Hardware is redesigned every few years to accommodate needs, just as software is.

blackguardx 17y ago
EEs write code too.
- Locke1689 17y ago
  I've always been a little interested in this. How competent are EEs at general programming? This is a serious question -- the only EEs I know that program wrote some really crappy assembly code for a robotics project I helped on (don't even get me started on their C).
  - acgourley 17y ago
    They probably say the same thing about your circuit design
    - dagw 17y ago
      The difference being that circuit design isn't part of the CS curriculum and most programmers wouldn't claim to know circuit design.
      - stcredzero 17y ago
        Actually, it is covered in some courses like "NAND to Tetris." It should be covered.

tsally 17y ago

Software "engineering" != CS. I know Greenspun knows that, and I know the CS label is just for the purposes of the joke, but still. Java has already been harmful enough to CS. :-p

ssp 17y ago
Greenspun didn't write it, he just posted it on his website.
- basugasu 17y ago
  The earliest I can trace it back to is this post to comp.lang.ada in 1994: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ada/msg/7a96d45d5ccc1ea3 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ada/msg/7a96d45d5cc... I like how he opens with "I felt like wasting bandwidth" so here's a funny story. Little could he imagine it would become #1 link on Hacker News, 15 years later :-)

jmtame 17y ago

"this looks like something i've seen before. i can get you a better one by tomorrow." mark it up by a factor of 2 to buy a toaster someone else built and sell it for profit. assure the king you can massively produce the toasters, but you must retain the licensing rights to sell to other countries. you buy the rights to the toaster and make millions.

ErrantX 17y ago

As an engineer; the engineering solition presented here is very poor. It ignores the problem domain almost entirely and focuses on only one minor (and hard to quantify) variable. The cs solution is banal too - but it appears thisis down to the writers bias.

stcredzero 17y ago
Lots of assumptions are being made that might not apply to the kingdom. No one asks if people want toast done on one side or both. Does everyone even have electricity? The best solution might even be wire racks to put over gas burners.

endtime 17y ago

This is just zero-insight flamebait.

drats 17y ago
Exactly this is stooping incredibly low. Here's a different story: A king called an electrical engineer and a computer scientist together and gave them a task best suited to an electrical engineer (something which the computer scientist very well realized). He then tried to execute the computer scientist for the inferior design. But the computer scientist ran away and started a search engine and provided people with cryptography. These helped in getting information to the people who realized that being ruled by a king who executes people is stupid so they overthrew him and built a democracy of entrepreneurs where engineers and computer scientists worked together on cool products for the mutual gain of all. It was a vibrant society with free speech, which unfortunately meant there were a lot of stupid Internet trolls who had to be ignored. Luckily computer scientists designed systems of information aggregation where the trolls could be downvoted from serious forums of discussion. Unfortunately those left without the power to downvote had to try to find amusing ways to get other people to do it.
- michaelneale 17y ago
  Hold on a minute - that isn't fair. I am an Elec Eng who works in CS. Had to go back and learn stuff (who doesn't). And I can't blame the king for executing a CS for bad inheritance based OO design.
huherto 17y ago
We (CS or SE) do tend to do things more complicated than they should be. This has been recognized by many. There is a very interesting article (I think by Martin Fowler, but I can't find it ) about why you can make any aspect of software flexible. But you can't make every aspect flexible. Making one aspect flexible has the cost of increasing the complexity of the software; making every aspect flexible increases the complexity to the point where the software cannot be changed any more. There is also the YAGNI principle, which is clearly broken by the CS engineer on the king's story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aint_gonna_need_it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aint_gonna_need_it

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]