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The argument about computers and computer technology being almost stagnant for the past 40 years is the science behind it. Look at programming languages. They
by zxcdw 14y ago
The argument about computers and computer technology being almost stagnant for the past 40 years is the science behind it.
Look at programming languages. They still borrow from C very heavily. What major advancements have there been during the past 10-20 years? Look at operating systems. The Unix way of thinking and the fundamental concepts still live on, because they work. What advancements have there been to the fundamental ideas and aspects of operating systems? How about compilers? How about computer architecture? CISC to RISC? We still use von Neumann architecture from 50's, surely by now we would have came up with something superior? No. Your iPhone 5 relies on the concepts realized by scientists 50-60 years ago.
The thing is, that most advancements in the field come from technological advancemnts which actually come from our ability to produce better-performing silicon chips. iPhone owes so much to semiconductor industry and other advancements in physical technology which takes advantage of the fundamental CS concepts developed mainly in the 60's and 70's. Computer science itself has been still for ages, and will remain so, unless some new science comes up and revolutionarizes the field. Until then we owe to Gödel, Turing, von Neumann, Dikstra, Knuth, Ritchie and so on. Not to Jobs. Or Gates. Or Torvalds. These people are irrelevant from science point of view.
We need new sciences to fuel technologies which can be put to use. Praise semiconductor industry, chemistry, physics, nanotechnology and so on. But don't ever relate iPhone or whatever else web 2.0-Apple-Social-cult to the science behind computing.
In short, we build upon what was discovered 30-40 years ago, and no new fundamental discoveries are made.
- cmccabe 14y agoWhat's the point of having a pissing match between engineers and scientists? You need both to push technology forward. Science can lead to better engineering, but better engineering can also lead to better science as well. You don't get very far in astronomy unless your engineers can build telescopes. You don't get very far in computational biology without engineers to create microchips, write software, etc. What was the use of spending all that effort to get to the moon? There wasn't much interesting up there, scientifically. And the ballistics used would have been familiar to Isaac Newton. But it turns out that going to the moon pushed forward a lot of fields, like materials science, aerodynamics, and so forth. If you have only disdain for practical things, you end up like the ancient Greeks-- smart guys who were unwilling to get their hands dirty by actually doing an experiment or building a device. So, for example, they philosophized about what must be inside the human body, rather than actually looking. They discovered the steam engine but dismissed it as a toy. If theoretical CS hasn't advanced that much in the last 30 years, maybe it's because there isn't that much left to discover there. And that would be fine. There's more than ever going on in computational biology, material science, chemistry, and so forth. Who knows. Maybe some grubby engineers will come up with a quantum computer, and then theoretical CS people will have something to do again. All we know for sure is that keeping an open mind and a reasonable-sized ego is the best way to approach the problem.