We’re Apparently Still Not a Science
This happens all the time, and irks me more with each passing year: PostRank has several categorized lists of “best blogs“, as judged by popularity, influence, and what-not. Problem is, their categorization doesn’t include “computer science” as a science: there’s agriculture, anthropology, and so on down to urban planning, but not computer science. CS doesn’t show up under “Technology”, either: that covers things from “Agile” through “Photoshop” to “UX”, but not the theoretical or research aspects of computing. Undergrad enrolment in CS looks like it’s finally starting to climb again, after six or seven years in the basement, but if we ever want to break the boom-and-bust cycle, we need people (particularly high school students and teachers) to understand that computer is science.
I think that’ll only happen when the science aspects and the more programming/engineering aspects are more separated out. Right now too many people see CS as where you learn programming and the like in preparation for a programming job. So computer science needs to bifurcate sort of the way physics and engineering are separate.
Some colleges are doing that a bit with separate IT tracks and the like. But really your complaint comes about because there are no alternatives to CS for college students wanting to do more engineering than science.
The PostRank lists are based on community generated topics from PostRank.com. If you want to add a CS topic, you can
Sorry for the annoyingly pedantic question, but why is ‘computer science’ a science? Isn’t it a mixture of mathematics (ex: algorithms have difficult ‘functional forms’, automatas, etc.) and engineering (when somebody tries to actually build something).
The distinction I hope you can clarify is that of ‘science’ and ‘scientific methods’, which though I laud your efforts to be more scientific in engineering practices, aren’t equivalent.
This depends on one’s definition of science (which I wouldn’t take from a blogroll), but I argue that most reasonable definitions exclude mathematics and engineering (thus computer science) as sciences. Even though one may use scientific reasoning and induction to measure something, the quantity you’re measuring arises from the axioms of your system, even if it’s non-obvious how the quantity arises from the axioms. In science, nature appears to have it’s own axioms we’re trying to determine.
Could you elaborate on your reasoning perhaps? Is it maybe from the ‘sociology’ angle since people, which are hard to model, write code?