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What is it about, then?

• macintux 9y ago
  When I think computer science, I think things like the lambda calculus, invented before programming languages. Richard Hamming's work on information theory. In the distributed systems world we have Lamport's work on vector clocks and Paxos, the CAP theorem by Brewer, the Domino paper from Amazon. In other spaces we have the machine learning and neural networks, blockchain... These are computer science, and they're certainly implemented with programming languages, but they were conceived (and often proved) independently of any implementation.
  • jacobr1 9y ago
    I think what the prior posting was getting at (and this too is fuzzy and doesn't capture the full scope of CS) is that most of what you mention is algorithmic. Understanding, proving, and discussing algorithms requires describing and reasoning about computation using some form of notation. That doesn't require any particular programming language or pseudo-code notation. But it does require something to communicate with any kind of rigor.