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A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

(initcoder.com)
165 points chbkall | 2 comments | 05 Jul 25 08:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.47s | source
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andrew_lettuce ◴[05 Jul 25 17:56 UTC] No.44474379[source]▶
I see people conflate computer science with computer programming regularly. If you are motivated to build things you probably want to pursue the latter, and dig in to understand how the things you use work. Maybe your want to go deeper academically in certain areas, but do you want to be motivated by real world application or theoretical underpinnings? True comp sci is a lot closer to mathematics than most people's think. Sometimes this is required for deep understanding of what you're doing as a developer, but rarely.
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tkcranny ◴[05 Jul 25 19:08 UTC] No.44474804[source]▶
“Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes” — Edsger W. Dijkstra
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raddan ◴[05 Jul 25 23:12 UTC] No.44476309[source]▶
I have always found this quote annoying. There are many ways to solve problems, but when you constrain yourself to solving them mechanistically, that is what makes computer science computer science. Virtually every theoretical CS paper implicitly presupposes a specific model of computation. Sometimes they even say it explicitly.

Sure, computer science is not about a specific computer. But it is definitely about computers.

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1. tkcranny ◴[06 Jul 25 05:08 UTC] No.44477994[source]▶
Respectfully I disagree. I believe what Dijkstra is getting at is that the specifics of modern computers aren’t “relevant” at all. Ultimately it’s the science of information and whats computable. Be that a modern day silicon processor at X gigahertz, a pen and paper, or a universe sized computer, that’s irrelevant for the science itself.
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2. raddan ◴[06 Jul 25 12:13 UTC] No.44480078[source]▶
We don’t actually disagree. Note that Dijkstra did not say “modern computer.” He said “computer.” Computer science is in a major way about what “is computable.”