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The same might have been said of a "Computer Science" degree when it split out of mathematics departments. I don't know, the jury's out, but there is a case for
by pishpash 8y ago
The same might have been said of a "Computer Science" degree when it split out of mathematics departments. I don't know, the jury's out, but there is a case for teaching what is an expanding area of knowledge with different emphasis than what came before.
An undergraduate degree obviously will be more cursory than a graduate program but even then it might help produce a crop of better thinkers for graduate programs with already solid background. There's nothing inherently preventing an 18-year-old from learning this kind of stuff.
- terminalcommand 8y agoI did not study computer science, but on my many years of self-studying I've realised that Mathematics, especially Discrete Mathematics and theoretical Computer Science essentially pursue the same objective using very similar tools. I'm currently reading Turing's famous paper "Can Machines Think?" and the way Turing explains computers, state machines and Laplace's idea of a deterministic universe made me think about the current state of CS. It seems to me that CS faculties change their curricula to teach students more and more about practical programming and less about its history and theoretical foundations. I think that is not right. Many of my friends are studying CS as their major, but it seems to me that they don't grasp the deeper meaning of the field. For them CS is about programming, about building apps. For me computer science is not about programming and computers, it is about creating an abstract world of computation that is independent from us. Maybe it would've been a good decision to keep theoretical computer science inside mathematics departments and offer a computer engineering degree for practical applications such as programming.