Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!ut-sally!utah-cs!defun.utah.edu!shebs
From: shebs%defun.utah.edu.uucp@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley T. Shebs)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Re : First Languages
Message-ID: <5308@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: 3 Mar 88 06:22:51 GMT
References: <1016@its63b.ed.ac.uk> <2922@pitt.UUCP>
Sender: news@utah-cs.UUCP
Reply-To: shebs%defun.utah.edu.UUCP@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley T. Shebs)
Organization: PASS Research Group
Lines: 21
Keywords: ML

In article <2922@pitt.UUCP> jonathan@vax.cs.pittsburgh.edu.UUCP (Jonathan Eunice) writes:

>The bulk of CS, as it is generally talked about, is engineering --
>designing, working out practical problems, implementing, etc.  It most
>certainly *is not* like mathematics.  We delude ourself if we somehow
>think that what we're doing is somehow more akin to what chemists and
>biologists do that what {chemical, mechanical, electrical, ...} engineers 
>do.

Even the more applied parts of CS could be characterized as a sort of
"mathematical engineering".  Even theory-hating hackers use more abstractions
than most pure mathematicians (notice that I said "use" not "prove").

Actually, this is turning into yet another argument about what CS really is.
I haven't seen anyone mention that the traditional sciences have theoretical
and experimental subdivisions.  There are a lot of similarities between the
physicist building/using a particle accelerator, and an OS researcher building
and experimenting with a new system.

							stan shebs
							shebs@cs.utah.edu