make clean

perception

This made some headlines today. Once I finished laughing at it, I was pretty much ready to start crying at how sad it was.

A recent conversation, similarly, included:
rob: they need to drop the scientist thing. CS is CE IMO

I'm going to try to avoid too long of a rant, but feel free to stop reading after a few pages.

Starting with the article, it attempts to make some assertions about the state of CS and where it needs to go. It clearly misses the relevance of Rob's statement, and this is a very serious fundamental flaw.

Computer science != software engineering != IT

(and for the IT majors, ``!='' means not equal)

The article repeatedly talks about the different fields computer science can be applied to. While this is certainly true, there is a remarkable lack of the terms ``algorithm'', ``compiler'', ``architecture'', etc... This is important, because those are the sorts of terms which matter most to computer scientists.

I know it's blindingly obvious, but most schools generating computer science students are in fact producing software engineers. I don't see this production as a problem - there's obviously a huge need. Only the naming. It is, for lack of a better term, polluting perception of the field.

The comment ``Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs...'' is somewhat indicative of this. I think, however, in this case, that CMU is headed towards some sort of new (hybrid) field, rather than software engineering.

Unfortunately, I consider Rob's quote to be slightly inaccurate, and I view Computer Engineering as sort of a cross-over field between computer science and electrical engineering, but I think (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here) that he meant more along the lines of software engineering.

Oddly enough, I do agree with two of the major points of the article:
1) High schools generally do a horrible job of preparing students for computer science. My personal experience aside (which we'll just call ``far worse''), I'm fairly confident that two of the three terms listed above as being important to computer scientists are not mentioned in most high school curricula.
2) I've long held that women have potential to be better computer scientists than men. A great many seem to pick up analytical skills much more quickly than men do.

(Note: this was the _very_ short version. if you have complaints on any points, feel free to ask for elaboration)

posted by toasty @ 4/17/2007 08:31:00 PM