4 ms·

Programming science does not exist.

• Apocryphon 5y ago
  And yet, programming claims to be guided by computer science.
  • native_samples 5y ago
    Universities claim programming is guided by computer science, because they love sticking the label "science" on non-scientific things. The average working programmer probably doesn't care whether their work is considered a science or not. Certainly I feel like the ROI on reading CS papers in my own career has been quite low. They have a habit of sounding useful and impactful until you finish reading them and realize there's a pretty major catch. I have a degree named "computer science" but it's questionable whether it was really scientific, given that science is usually defined as a study of the natural world. There's nothing natural about computer programming, outside of perhaps complexity theory. You could argue that maybe at the edges deep learning is blurring into a study of naturalistic phenomena, but you have to be careful, otherwise you reclassify pure maths as a science and I think everyone agrees that it's a separate thing.
  • FeepingCreature 5y ago
    Computer science is only vaguely related to programming, in roughly the same way that the travelling salesman problem is related to actually travelling salesmen. (I personally hold that there are only three CS courses relevant to daily programmer life: graph theory, complexity analysis and state machines. Everything else is at best situational.)