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Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. - Dijkstra
by nutjob2 8y ago
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
- Dijkstra
- carapace 8y ago"Calling it 'computer science' is like calling surgery 'knife science'." ~ also Dijkstra
- erk__ 8y agoMy professor says that it would be like calling astonomy telescope science. In Danish it is called "Datalogi" the teaching of data because the founder of danish computer science, Peter Nauer, called it that.
- sattoshi 8y agoDataology would have been a great name. I would have loved to be a dataologist.
- shub 8y agoI am a dataologist, even if my title says software something something. Commercial software development is about getting data from point A to point B more than anything else. There's a little bit of logic, a little bit of munging, but almost all of what could be called an algorithm is done by a library or some other system--probably a database. It's maybe once a year that doing something algorithmic, e.g. reduce a regex to a hand-coded FSM, or write an exponentially decaying counter, is actually the best thing I can do to solve the problem at hand.
- omaranto 8y agoI also like wiskunde for mathematics, I've been told it means something like the study of certainty.
- grimbly 8y agoWankunde, more like it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- CiTyBear 8y agoIn french there is a dedicated word: 'Informatique'. Which is a portmanteau word for automatic information
- white-flame 8y agoI would love for "Computology" to become the preferred term.
- fnord123 8y agoComputational Science.
- adrianN 8y agoThat term is already taken for people who use computers to do science, e.g. physicists doing computational modelling.
- Bromskloss 8y agoDijkstra preferred "computing science", didn't he? Now, calling it "science" at all is problematic if you don't consider mathematics to be a science.
- fnord123 8y agoDo mathematicians perform experiments? Do people who research computation?
- Bromskloss 8y agoAre you discussing the questions of whether computer science is mathematics? Dijkstra considered it to be, and was not a fan of "experimental computer science".
- Wildgoose 8y agoMy degree is actually in "Computational Science" (University of Hull, England). However they decided to rename it to the standard "Computer Science" the year after I started.
- vram22 8y agoI've seen that in some UK univs they call it Computing. I think that's a better term. One short word, too.
- sandwell 8y agoDijkstra met Mike Fellows (who co-authored the original CS Unplugged with Tim Bell) early in Michael's career, who originally quoted this, but it's often misattributed to Dijkstra as he is slightly more famous! Tim Bell was on Changelog podcast #302 talking about CS Unplugged and mentioned this at some point.