Computer Science is not science, and it's not about computers. Got reminded about this gem from MIT the other day

You should watch the series, which can be a bit slow moving, up until you get to the eval/apply discussion where he puts on a wizard 🧙‍♂️ hat; that part is pretty mind blowing 🤯

I've actually watched this series few years back. I agree it's absolute cinema

@SmorglesBord Where do you watch this?

@SmorglesBord

Seems like a great teacher. Entertaining and educative, nice intro!

The course itself is also very good

I'm sure it is. MIT was my "dream university" back when I was a student.

Peter Thiel said it best. Any subject called "science" is an embellishment, like CS or Political Science. Chemistry and Physics are self-evident practices. A better description would be Algorithmonomy or "the order of understanding step-by-step procedures"

I believe we evolved out of the math department.

That justification for why it's not science seems rather weak to me. What's his definition of science, and why wouldn't the science (Latin: scientia - knowledge) of how computers work, fall under an aspect of reality that can be studied scientifically?

..we don't have much better ones, but she will always be best pure gold

Do you have a link to the full video?

Thank you! 🙏

Read. This. Book. In case you haven't.

How can you trust a guy who keeps his watch on the wrong wrist? Jokes aside, I think I know where he's going, and he's quite right.

He's left-handed so he gets a pass ))

No, that just means he practices witchcraft. Which... actually confirms what he said, goodness gracious!

Should be called computology

Occultist who can code here. Yes.

CS is finally a real science now I’d say. The ai scaling laws for ex were discovered from experiments, not predicted or invented.

too bad they no longer teach lisp

My friend posted this the other day and I had to look into it. My friend commented underneath the post and said, “mathematics is mostly symbolic computation” and I really had to pause and ponder what he meant. 🧐

So what is a better name for Computer Science? Systems Engineering?

It's a nice play on words, but fundamentally incorrect. Computer science is a field of science just like mathematics. e.g. it has unique fields like computational complexity theory.

The book, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, SICP, is THE best, deeply fundamental book out there, took the online class, a two week blitz, via a corporate program in the 80's, and was simply amazing. Was so grateful to have had that opportunity.

That is the dumbest, most midwit attempt to make ones self sound smart that I have heard in ages. Not the least of which he didn't bother to look up any of the words he was using. This is what happens when people confuse an ability to code with intelligence and an ability to teach.

Having consumed only this portion of his presentation, this really seems like the kind of thing you quote to others to make yourself seem clever and gives you an excuse to correct others when they use the term.

Anything that has science in its name is not science.

Mmm I’m not agree with you, let me elaborate.. Computing is indeed a science, since its origins, it has relied on solid scientific foundations such a logic (Boole, Church, Gödel), computability theory (Turing), and algorithmic complexity (Shannon, Chomsky).

I might be wrong, but to me it sounds and looks like gatekeeping BS.

He's literally teaching the subject.....

So teachers can't be gatekeepers and can't spread BS?

@valigo Part of the Scratch ethos is about ensuring that we avoid gate keeping. Hal isn't gate keeping here, at all, and instead pointing out how young the subject matter is in and of itself and I'd go further and say that Computer Science ought to be treated as an applied maths degree.

@valigo To me as self taught full stack developer with 10 years experience this video sounds in best case as useless jabbering (again my gut feeling tells me he is gatekeeping). You probably need to be deep in academic environment to appriciate/relate to the stuff he says...

@colbygk @valigo I gave gemini the transcript of the lecture and its summary didn't add anything valuable to change my perception. Even more it partially confirms that I'm not alone with that perception. Again I might be wrong, but all the BS comments here just reinforce my gut feeling.

Pretty sure I disagree with that. We had to design a whole CPU at the gate level in my comp sci program.

I designed the 2nd version of Amazon's kindle pricing engine based on these lectures :-) Mind blowing lectures. Must read for any software dev out there. Just a couple of years back, one of the VPs in Google was solving the book exercise puzzles.

I majored in computer science in the early 80s. It was far more about engineering than anything else. I ended up being a software engineer until I retired.

Sounds like he was talking about the industery, many colleges avoid teaching the theortical side of the Computer science cause they call it "Useless", and most instructors are not qulified in that field cause they are business ppl as well, so it depends on how you see it.

Love to hear the full lecture, especially how it relates so much to magic.

It's available free of charge on youtube:

tell me more about magic analogy!

Exactly. It’s more about problem-solving and systems thinking than machines or code. The “computer” is just the medium ..... the science is in how we think.

There's tons of important stuff associated to computer science which makes it a loaded term. But yes, the act of programming is the act of formally encoding magic spells. It's as formal as mathematics. I was already a programmer when I read SICP and it still changed my life.

I agree with the computer part. But I don’t agree with discarding “science”. Every science turns observations (of atoms, animals, universe, etc.) into rules and CS turns observations of what we can compute and how into rules for efficient program composition.

In colleges, computer science is sometimes in the math depart and other times in the engineering department. In Europe the name is Informatics. In corporations the name is Information Technology (IT) .

computer science being equivalent to ancient geometry is a profound concept. as a result of geometry's "measuring physical space" focus, early mathematicians missed out on the concept of "zero" which basically didn't exist until the early 1000s what CS concept is our zero?

Computer science is a branch of math. A pity you weren’t taught that.

SICP is very good, still relevant

He is wrong by the way. It is very much about computers.