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> Another way to explain the shallowness of Computer Science > is that it's the only discipline that eschews paradox. > Even mathematics has reams of unanswer

> Another way to explain the shallowness of Computer Science > is that it's the only discipline that eschews paradox. > Even mathematics has reams of unanswered questions and > potential paradox in its core philosophy. In Computer > Science, there's none. It's assumed that all of it is > pretty much solved and your job as an undergraduate is > to just learn to get a job in this totally solved area > of expertise. Zed is confusing software engineering with computer science. CS is a branch of applied mathematics, and it's not different from mathematics. There are unsolved problems and plenty of areas that require further research.

robryan 16y ago
It's not like software engineering doesn't have unsolved problems either, like why is it still so hard to produce bug free software, why programmer productivity has only gone up a small amount despite 30 years of language advances and why most software still has to be mostly custom. The dream from the earlier days of software engineering where we were eventually meant to have components that could easily be mixed and matched to create whatever we want hasn't eventuated.
- rbranson 16y ago
  I don't think we'll ever get around having to build software with code and highly trained developers. The world is still very much custom engineered, from architecture to civil engineering, electrical to mechanical engineering, even mass produced items have relatively few interchangeable parts.
  - prosa 16y ago
    I agree. However, it is worth examining places like Dubai -- the tallest building in the world, and indeed practically an entire new city, was built by unskilled laborers working for dollars a day. That's a compelling case for commoditization of talent, but in the end I think it's just a heuristic improvement. It gets you pretty far, but at the end of the day you still have huge teams of PhDs and M.Archs doing the actual engineering. (If that was commoditized it would be a scary world indeed!)
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      > an entire new city, was built by unskilled laborers working for dollars a day. Let's see if it's still standing a couple decades from now.
      - werrett 16y ago
        >> an entire new city, was built by unskilled laborers working for dollars a day. > Let's see if it's still standing a couple decades from now. I didn't realise that it was solely teams of skilled engineers and artisans doing the riveting on Empire State back in 1930.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        You do, of course, understand how over-engineered is the Empire State by today's standards. I seriously doubt 30's margins are still being applied.
jrockway 16y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure I agree with him at all. I would say that the human race knows approximately nothing about building software. Yeah, we can do it, but we're not very good at it. If bridges and buildings were software, we would have all died in collapsing buildings and the human race would be extinct.
- scorpion032 16y ago
  Software is built the way to collapse _because_ it's not like brides and people don't lose lives if it collapses. A little bit of Darwin, on why things are the way they are.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    Wrong. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b1pkKR-Acc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b1pkKR-Acc (If you don't want to watch the video, read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296)
    - hga 16y ago
      Given that the flight recorders were tampered with I can't see how you can be so sure it was caused by software. Frankly, anyone flying at a low speed and very low altitude (which I define here as few hundred feet) with jet engines at idle needs to have their head examined. Whatever the software did or didn't do, the pilots knew all of these details and that with their craft's low energy level and the engines spooled down they had little or no margin for error, their's or the new (less than one and half years since first flight) fly-by-wire software.
scott_s 16y ago
There is more to Computer Science than Math. Previous posts on the topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968013 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968013 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690798 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690798 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131606 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131606
astrec 16y ago
Seems to be talking more about Software Engineering, Business Systems, and Information Technology degrees which started to replace CS (and the awesome CS/Philosophy double) during the late 90s. You can test the depth of CS for yourself when you take your first formal methods course.
shadowsun7 16y ago
Abso-blooming-lutely. Whatever happened to NP-Complete as an icky problem nobody can solve? That's exclusive to computer science right there.
j_baker 16y ago
Erm... Not to say too much, but I'm pretty sure mathematicians would envy CS not having paradoxes.

robryan 16y ago

It's not like software engineering doesn't have unsolved problems either, like why is it still so hard to produce bug free software, why programmer productivity has only gone up a small amount despite 30 years of language advances and why most software still has to be mostly custom. The dream from the earlier days of software engineering where we were eventually meant to have components that could easily be mixed and matched to create whatever we want hasn't eventuated.

rbranson 16y ago
I don't think we'll ever get around having to build software with code and highly trained developers. The world is still very much custom engineered, from architecture to civil engineering, electrical to mechanical engineering, even mass produced items have relatively few interchangeable parts.
- prosa 16y ago
  I agree. However, it is worth examining places like Dubai -- the tallest building in the world, and indeed practically an entire new city, was built by unskilled laborers working for dollars a day. That's a compelling case for commoditization of talent, but in the end I think it's just a heuristic improvement. It gets you pretty far, but at the end of the day you still have huge teams of PhDs and M.Archs doing the actual engineering. (If that was commoditized it would be a scary world indeed!)
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    > an entire new city, was built by unskilled laborers working for dollars a day. Let's see if it's still standing a couple decades from now.
    - werrett 16y ago
      >> an entire new city, was built by unskilled laborers working for dollars a day. > Let's see if it's still standing a couple decades from now. I didn't realise that it was solely teams of skilled engineers and artisans doing the riveting on Empire State back in 1930.
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        You do, of course, understand how over-engineered is the Empire State by today's standards. I seriously doubt 30's margins are still being applied.

jrockway 16y ago

Yeah, I'm not sure I agree with him at all. I would say that the human race knows approximately nothing about building software. Yeah, we can do it, but we're not very good at it. If bridges and buildings were software, we would have all died in collapsing buildings and the human race would be extinct.

scorpion032 16y ago
Software is built the way to collapse _because_ it's not like brides and people don't lose lives if it collapses. A little bit of Darwin, on why things are the way they are.
- jrockway 16y ago
  Wrong. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b1pkKR-Acc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b1pkKR-Acc (If you don't want to watch the video, read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296)
  - hga 16y ago
    Given that the flight recorders were tampered with I can't see how you can be so sure it was caused by software. Frankly, anyone flying at a low speed and very low altitude (which I define here as few hundred feet) with jet engines at idle needs to have their head examined. Whatever the software did or didn't do, the pilots knew all of these details and that with their craft's low energy level and the engines spooled down they had little or no margin for error, their's or the new (less than one and half years since first flight) fly-by-wire software.

scott_s 16y ago

There is more to Computer Science than Math. Previous posts on the topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968013 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968013 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690798 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690798 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131606 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131606

astrec 16y ago

Seems to be talking more about Software Engineering, Business Systems, and Information Technology degrees which started to replace CS (and the awesome CS/Philosophy double) during the late 90s. You can test the depth of CS for yourself when you take your first formal methods course.

shadowsun7 16y ago

Abso-blooming-lutely. Whatever happened to NP-Complete as an icky problem nobody can solve? That's exclusive to computer science right there.

j_baker 16y ago

Erm... Not to say too much, but I'm pretty sure mathematicians would envy CS not having paradoxes.