SICP / What is "Computer Science" ?
LarryNorman1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2008–2014
lecture · intro · evergreen · 2008–2014 on HN
An excerpt from Hal Abelson's opening SICP lecture introducing computer science and contrasting declarative and imperative knowledge. He argues that computer science is not really a science and is more like magic or engineering of ideas.
Cited in debates over whether computer science is a science, and for Abelson's line that it is neither a science nor about computers.
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4 comments from Hacker News
"Anything which uses science as part of its name isn't: political science, creation science, computer science." - Hal Abelson I would also recommend the first minutes of ▶ this video
Hal Abelson disagrees with you. "Computer Science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, its not a science. It might engineering, or it might be art. But we'll actually see that computer -- so-called science -- actually has a lot in common with magic."[1] 1. ▶ this video
Feynman's view on CS is similar by Hal Abelson's take on the term (see ▶ this video ). Abelson's point about CS being more like magic has always stuck with me.
It is not a science. It is also not about computers. :) SICP lecture 1 -- ▶ this video But maybe it is a science: there are certainly a number of things in CS that yield facts about things like algorithms (Big O, etc). I read other comments here that compare computer science to math, and it is not an unfair comparison. However, even amongst mathematicians, you will see something of an avoidance to associate math with science. Math is a framework of a sort, a way to think. When we are talking about how to think, we are talking about philosophy. Science has its own roots in philosophy, so it is not surprising that we see some grey areas here. So let me rephrase it a little... When you learn Computer Science, you learn how to think. People compare CS with engineering disciplines, but we find that there are a lot of methodology salesmen but few magic bullets. The problem with comparing computer programming (the practical side of CS) to engineering is that programming is very difficult to measure. We graduated from the idea of measuring lines of code. We have not figured out how to accurately measure a technique like TDD. We have an idea that code quality can rise when people pay attention to it, when people think about the problem; we can encourage this with code reviews, but we can do the same by encouraging developers to have a good night's sleep. We have conjured approximations for our measurements, but none of this has quite the feel of engineering. We are not building bridges, co