3 ms·

Anecdotally: I went to a college in Boston in early 2000s for my CS degree and it was undergoing extra ABET accreditation to put it in line with the engineerin

by throwaway2016a 5y ago

Anecdotally: I went to a college in Boston in early 2000s for my CS degree and it was undergoing extra ABET accreditation to put it in line with the engineering programs. The prior year has mostly algebra based course work but due to the change: all our math (including physics) was switch to calculus based just like the other engineering programs. And the theory courses got more in depth. So if I had to guess based on my personal experience I'd say added rigor is possibly due to the field becoming less like a free-for-all and more like engineering. In other words, knowing why something works vs just experimenting until you stumble upon something that works. I've always appreciated a B.Sc. or M.Sc. in Computer Science as the academically rigorous cousins of Associate degrees, B.A., and bootcamps. You can get a job with both types of education but one understands the theory behind things far better. Edit: Not sure if it is like this globally so just as an FYI... B.Sc. and M.Sc. are Bachelor and Master of "science" degrees where as B.A. is in the Liberal Arts. In the US you have CS degrees in both. The B.A. is more well rounded but the B.Sc. is more rigorous in theory and math.

sumtechguy 5y ago
What degree you get kind of depends on which college you went to and when. The difference in my school between the eng track and the arts track was basically 2 classes between the two programs. Both programs were run by the same professors. If I had got the degree 10 years earlier I would not have been able to get it and only could have gone math with a study in CS. As is, I think my CS program was 6 hours away from an additional math degree. Which makes sense as the math programs typically were supersets of the CS degree for a long time. I do not know about the time after but from what I heard they simplified the program a bit and went more algerbra/java like you said.
lanstin 5y ago
The original article is not about these things. It is about the difficulty of the rigor increasing. From some sort of easy encoding of computation into integer math to doing Fourier analysis over booleans. From maths you can grok in a few hours to the horrendously complex stuff in number theory that takes days and you aren’t really sure you get it. In neither case is it a matter of theory vs practice. It is that the mechanics used by theorists is a lot more difficult than a few decades ago. Actual software development becoming like engineering, which seems counter to my experience, is a different issue. In my experience software veers away from engineering because as soon as something is standardized enough to not be novel, it’s completely captured by a library or service or something and is a solved problem. The new software is always doing something new. And there are no lessons learned, except, ironically, at the deep theory level.

sumtechguy 5y ago

What degree you get kind of depends on which college you went to and when. The difference in my school between the eng track and the arts track was basically 2 classes between the two programs. Both programs were run by the same professors. If I had got the degree 10 years earlier I would not have been able to get it and only could have gone math with a study in CS. As is, I think my CS program was 6 hours away from an additional math degree. Which makes sense as the math programs typically were supersets of the CS degree for a long time. I do not know about the time after but from what I heard they simplified the program a bit and went more algerbra/java like you said.

lanstin 5y ago

The original article is not about these things. It is about the difficulty of the rigor increasing. From some sort of easy encoding of computation into integer math to doing Fourier analysis over booleans. From maths you can grok in a few hours to the horrendously complex stuff in number theory that takes days and you aren’t really sure you get it. In neither case is it a matter of theory vs practice. It is that the mechanics used by theorists is a lot more difficult than a few decades ago. Actual software development becoming like engineering, which seems counter to my experience, is a different issue. In my experience software veers away from engineering because as soon as something is standardized enough to not be novel, it’s completely captured by a library or service or something and is a solved problem. The new software is always doing something new. And there are no lessons learned, except, ironically, at the deep theory level.