You must be good at Math
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My BS in CS took its roots down to CMOS composition of logic gates and basic EE, on the hardware side, and down to deriving numbers and arithmetic from Boolean logic / predicate calculus, on the philosophy side. Then tied those up together through the theoretical underpinnings of computation and problem solving, like a trunk, and branched back out into the various mainstream technologies that derived from all that. It obviously all depends on the program at the school of choice, I suppose, and I'm sure it's evolved over the years, but it still seems important to have at least some courses that pull back the wizard's curtain to ensure their students really see how it's all just an increasingly elaborate, high-tech version of conceptually simple (in function) machinery carrying out fundamental building blocks of logic.
Anyway, I'm going to go sniff my own cinnamon roll scented farts while gazing in the mirror, now.
We did the same thing, going so far as to "build" a simple imaginary CPU. It was interesting but ultimately dead knowledge.
I built an emulator for that CPU, which the university course took over and used for a few years for the course. But after that I never did anything with logic gates or anything like that.
I got into DIY electronics lateron as a hobby, but even then I never used logic gates and instead just slapped a cheap microcontroller on to handle all my logic needs.
I do use transistors sometimes e.g. for amplification, but we didn't learn anything about that in university.
In the end it feels like learning how to theoretically mine sand when studying to become an architect. Interesting, but also ultimately pointless.
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PID control is the classic example, but at a far enough abstraction any looping algorithm can be argued to be an implementation of the concepts underpinning calculus. If you're ever doing any statistical analysis or anything in game design having to do with motion, those are both calculus too. Data science is pure calculus, ground up and injected into your eyeballs, and any string manipulation or Regex is going to be built on lambda calculus (though a very correct argument can be made that literally all computer science is built of lambda calculus so that might be cheating to include it)
Does it apply to interpolation for animation and motion?
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Does it apply to interpolation for animation and motion?
Motion yes, but I have no idea about the mathematics of animation (sorry)
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The typical holder of a four-year degree from a decent university, whether it's in "computer science", "datalogy", "data science", or "informatics", learns about 3-5 programming languages at an introductory level and knows about programs, algorithms, data structures, and software engineering. Degrees usually require a bit of discrete maths too: sets, graphs, groups, and basic number theory. They do not necessarily know about computability theory: models & limits of computation; information theory: thresholds, tolerances, entropy, compression, machine learning; foundations for graphics, parsing, cryptography, or other essentials for the modern desktop.
For a taste of the difference, consider English WP's take on computability vs my recent rewrite of the esoteric-languages page, computable. Or compare WP's page on Conway's law to the nLab page which I wrote on Conway's law; it's kind of jaw-dropping that WP has the wrong quote for the law itself and gets the consequences wrong.
I‘d honestly be interested where you are from and how it is in other parts of the world. In my country (or at least at my university), we have to learn most of what you described during our bachelors. For us there is not much focus on programming languages though and more about concepts. If you want to learn programming, you are mostly on your own. The theories we learned are a good base though
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I got my BS in CSci about 15 years ago and it was 100% about programming in java. We didn't learn a fucking thing about hardware and my roommate was an EE major and we had none of the same classes except for calculus.
By the time I graduated java was basically dead. Thanks state college.
Yeah, EE and CS had a lot of cross over where I went. At least in undergrad, grad school saw them diverge a lot more, but they still never disentangled, parts of each were important to both. Hell we had stuff like A+ labs, and shit.
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If you want to know how computers work, do electrical engineering. If you want to know how electricity works, do physics. If you want to know how physics works, do mathematics. If you want to know how mathematics works, too bad, best you can do is think about the fact it works in philosophy.
all roads lead to philosophy
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You are right man
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I got my BS in CSci about 15 years ago and it was 100% about programming in java. We didn't learn a fucking thing about hardware and my roommate was an EE major and we had none of the same classes except for calculus.
By the time I graduated java was basically dead. Thanks state college.
My CS program had virtually no programming outside a couple of courses where C was used to implement concepts. Had one applications type course where mostly Java was used.
CS is and should be a specialized math curriculum IMO. Teaching specific programming languages is time that would be better spent teaching theory that can't be taught by dev docs or code bootcamps, as exemplified by your anecdote. Unfortunately nowadays people tend to see degrees as glorified job training programs.
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Well, computer science is not the science of computers, is it? It's about using computers (in the sense of programming them), not about making computers. Making computers is electrical engineering.
We all know how great we IT people are at naming things
Computational theory would be a better name, but it overlaps with a more specific subset of what is normally called CS.
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I mean, nowadays you need to be very smart and educated to google efficiently and avoid all the AI traps, missinformation, stackoverflow mods tripping, reading reddit threads on an issue with half the comments deleted because of the APIcalypse etc... sooo you could argue that you're somewhat of a scientist yourself
Had a discussion with my 8yo niece the other day… turned out the lesson was, sometimes it can be worse to know the wrong thing than to know nothing at all.
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Computational theory would be a better name, but it overlaps with a more specific subset of what is normally called CS.
We could also just call it Software Engineering. That's at least the job everyone gets with a Computer Science degree.
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all roads lead to philosophy
Everything is philosophy until it becomes science. Unless it's anything to do with politics then it just remains philosophy forever.
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Everything is philosophy until it becomes science. Unless it's anything to do with politics then it just remains philosophy forever.
Science is a subdiscipline of philosophy.
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A horseshoe capped off by Computer Science
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'd count theoretical computer science as a subfield of math, and practical software engineering among the other engineerings on the harder side of the centre.
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Maybe I'm missing something, but I'd count theoretical computer science as a subfield of math, and practical software engineering among the other engineerings on the harder side of the centre.
I wouldn't disagree with that. Discrete mathematics was a core subject when I did my Computer Science course.
But I do still laugh when I tell people I'm a 'scientist', with my fingers crossed behind my back of course
