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A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

(initcoder.com)
165 points chbkall | 3 comments | 05 Jul 25 08:52 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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danans ◴[06 Jul 25 08:00 UTC] No.44478724[source]▶
> There are many ways to solve problems, but when you constrain yourself to solving them mechanistically, that is what makes computer science computer science.

How would one solve a computational problem non-mechanistically? Even if executed with pen and paper, or sticks scribbling on sand, any algorithm is still mechanistic.

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raddan ◴[06 Jul 25 12:11 UTC] No.44480060[source]▶
Non-algorithmically, using intuition, like a (non-programmer) human.
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1. danans ◴[09 Jul 25 03:09 UTC] No.44506032[source]▶
But is it a computational problem then?
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2. raddan ◴[09 Jul 25 19:07 UTC] No.44513712[source]▶
Try doing a calculus problem. E.g., integration. Even if you do it on paper, your approach is probably wildly different than a computer integration algorithm. An algorithm that does it symbolically, ala Mathematica, is a pretty difficult thing to write for an arbitrary mathematical expression. People solve those problems largely through intuition, with a sprinkling of procedures that they remember.
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3. danans ◴[10 Jul 25 15:04 UTC] No.44521893[source]▶
> People solve those problems largely through intuition, with a sprinkling of procedures that they remember.

Without making the claim that LLMs have intuition (and certainly not inspiration), what you describe sounds analogous to an LLM with function calling.