5 ms·

Considering the founders intellectual merits, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that CS theory has been hard since day 0.

arethuza 5y ago
Out of interest, who do you regard as the founders of CS theory - I'd probably go for Church and Turing, but I can see arguments for others as well.
- tgv 5y ago
  Might want to add Post, Chomsky and Kleene, too.
- loraxclient 5y ago
  Tangential but may be of interest: a cool book (compilation?) that somewhat addresses this topic is ‘Ideas That Created the Future’ edited by Harry R. Lewis [0]. [0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ideas-created-future https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ideas-created-future
  - dc-programmer 5y ago
    Working through it now - reading the Laws of Thought by George Boole was a spiritual experience for me. The connection between natural language, logic, and math finally made sense to me. Before I had a hard time understanding the saliency of things like Analytic Philosophy (what does language have to do with truth?) or why the work of someone like Chomsky would be so important to computer scientists. Boole wasn't the only person at time to work on a project to reduce logic to solvable equations (clearly that time in history was ripe for this work, and also Leibniz had laid some of the spiritual groundwork, himself inspired by Ramon Llull and Confucian texts) but the way he wrote about it really resonated with me. The other surprising thing to me was that it didn't really resemble modern algebra at all. As a former math student I think it's easy to create a mental model of math history where when new fields are created they resemble the modern incarnation. But when you actually look at the primary founding texts its clear the ideas and notation are pretty unrefined at least compared to today's standards.
- varjag 5y ago
  Shannon, von Neumann
- criddell 5y ago
  Off topic, but Charles Petzold wrote a really great book that walks you through Turing's historic paper on computability and the Turing Machine. The book is called The Annotated Turing. I've just started reading it and Petzold claims all you need is a decent grasp of high school mathematics.
  - bengale 5y ago
    I've had that book on my shelf for so long, I really do need to shift it higher in my reading list.
    - mindcrime 5y ago
      I've had that book on my shelf for so long, I really do need to shift it higher in my reading list Glad to see I'm not the only one...
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  Gottfried Leibnitz, David Hilbert, Kurt Gödel.
  - mindcrime 5y ago
    Should Russell and Whitehead count as well, in terms of this path which seems focused on the formal logic aspect?
- voldacar 5y ago
  Leibniz technically
- wongarsu 5y ago
  What does "founder" mean to you? Leibniz did a lot of important foundational work 300 years ago, but at the same time CS as a separate field didn't emerge until the 1940s with pioneers like Turing.
tialaramex 5y ago
The nice thing about an open frontier is that it's really easy to be an innovator. If you put more than a passing thought into almost anything in the vast Terra Incognita you're faced with, you are now the world expert. Today Grace Hopper's "compiler" wouldn't merit the name, it's just a linker loader, what's the big deal? Well the big deal was nobody had actually programmed the computer to help them program the computer before. A huge sub-discipline of computer science simply didn't exist. Consider another discipline, metrology. Pioneers in metrology weren't doing advanced physics like you would see in a metrology lab today, they just had the insight that it sure is easier if everybody agrees how much corn this is, so they used prototypes, which is pretty much the simplest strategy but it's already a huge improvement on nothing at all. It took until this century for the last prototype (the Kilogram) to be replaced. On the route there those prototypes got a lot more sophisticated, and we learned a lot more about what it actually means to have a certain amount of a thing, so metrology got much harder.
tech_tuna 5y ago
Since day -1

arethuza 5y ago

Out of interest, who do you regard as the founders of CS theory - I'd probably go for Church and Turing, but I can see arguments for others as well.

tgv 5y ago
Might want to add Post, Chomsky and Kleene, too.
loraxclient 5y ago
Tangential but may be of interest: a cool book (compilation?) that somewhat addresses this topic is ‘Ideas That Created the Future’ edited by Harry R. Lewis [0]. [0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ideas-created-future https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ideas-created-future
- dc-programmer 5y ago
  Working through it now - reading the Laws of Thought by George Boole was a spiritual experience for me. The connection between natural language, logic, and math finally made sense to me. Before I had a hard time understanding the saliency of things like Analytic Philosophy (what does language have to do with truth?) or why the work of someone like Chomsky would be so important to computer scientists. Boole wasn't the only person at time to work on a project to reduce logic to solvable equations (clearly that time in history was ripe for this work, and also Leibniz had laid some of the spiritual groundwork, himself inspired by Ramon Llull and Confucian texts) but the way he wrote about it really resonated with me. The other surprising thing to me was that it didn't really resemble modern algebra at all. As a former math student I think it's easy to create a mental model of math history where when new fields are created they resemble the modern incarnation. But when you actually look at the primary founding texts its clear the ideas and notation are pretty unrefined at least compared to today's standards.
varjag 5y ago
Shannon, von Neumann
criddell 5y ago
Off topic, but Charles Petzold wrote a really great book that walks you through Turing's historic paper on computability and the Turing Machine. The book is called The Annotated Turing. I've just started reading it and Petzold claims all you need is a decent grasp of high school mathematics.
- bengale 5y ago
  I've had that book on my shelf for so long, I really do need to shift it higher in my reading list.
  - mindcrime 5y ago
    I've had that book on my shelf for so long, I really do need to shift it higher in my reading list Glad to see I'm not the only one...
DeathArrow 5y ago
Gottfried Leibnitz, David Hilbert, Kurt Gödel.
- mindcrime 5y ago
  Should Russell and Whitehead count as well, in terms of this path which seems focused on the formal logic aspect?
voldacar 5y ago
Leibniz technically
wongarsu 5y ago
What does "founder" mean to you? Leibniz did a lot of important foundational work 300 years ago, but at the same time CS as a separate field didn't emerge until the 1940s with pioneers like Turing.

tialaramex 5y ago

The nice thing about an open frontier is that it's really easy to be an innovator. If you put more than a passing thought into almost anything in the vast Terra Incognita you're faced with, you are now the world expert. Today Grace Hopper's "compiler" wouldn't merit the name, it's just a linker loader, what's the big deal? Well the big deal was nobody had actually programmed the computer to help them program the computer before. A huge sub-discipline of computer science simply didn't exist. Consider another discipline, metrology. Pioneers in metrology weren't doing advanced physics like you would see in a metrology lab today, they just had the insight that it sure is easier if everybody agrees how much corn this is, so they used prototypes, which is pretty much the simplest strategy but it's already a huge improvement on nothing at all. It took until this century for the last prototype (the Kilogram) to be replaced. On the route there those prototypes got a lot more sophisticated, and we learned a lot more about what it actually means to have a certain amount of a thing, so metrology got much harder.

tech_tuna 5y ago

Since day -1