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| ▲ | pjmlp a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I think bootcamps did more of a disservice, especially when folks come out of them calling themselves "engineers". | | |
| ▲ | toast0 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Totally, nobody can call themselves an engineer unless they wear a stripey hat. | | | |
| ▲ | win311fwg a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | "Engineer" is the word in the dictionary most fitting for it. The actual disservice was PEs, like the story of physicians deciding to call themselves doctors, trying to latch on to "engineer" to give their group credibility and muddying the waters. They could have just as easily given themselves a unique name to represent the unique group they want to be, but it is hard to market that. It is always easier to try and usurp a term the people already buy into. | | |
| ▲ | pjmlp a day ago | parent [-] | | I fully disagree, unless they took part into an university degree certified by the Engineers order of the respective country, with the only piece missing being the professional board exam. Doing a brick layer training doesn't make one a construction builder. | | |
| ▲ | awsglkhj 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Except programming isn't "building" in the first place. It's just really detailed design work. My toolchain does the construction. | | |
| ▲ | Jtsummers 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Engineering mostly isn't building either. AEs don't build the planes, they design them. EEs may prototype some boards, but as a profession it's also mostly design (intended for manufacture). Unless you're an EE working primarily on one-offs, and small ones at that, you don't build most of the products of your mind. MEs don't build the cars. CEs don't build the dams or bridges. Engineering is principally a design discipline, with a small fraction actually doing the hands-on building of their designs at least once they hit a certain scale of manufacture or get past prototyping. Technicians, skilled and unskilled labor, and machines do the vast majority of the building of those designs. | | |
| ▲ | awsglkhj 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think we're in violent agreement: Source code is detailed design, and programming is an engineering design process. We can and do design at higher levels, too. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes it is, brick layers in this analogy are those that are only coders. Then we have the whole team of engineers, architects, solution architects, that lay down the work for the coders, more often than not, some offshoring team. | |
| ▲ | win311fwg 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The toolchain does the detailed design work too. The job is more like driving a train — engineering, if you will. The toolchain can do its thing, but it can go off the rails, so you still have to know when to hit the breaks. | | |
| ▲ | awsglkhj 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think the closer analog is developing schematics for circuitry, where one might design in terms of existing ICs or adhere to a specification about input and output signals. Turning the schematic into a real device would then involve a host of processes, of varying degrees of automation. In the case of software engineering, source code occupies roughly the same position as a schematic, with all the "production" completely automated and highly reproducible. Yes, the toolchain can make decisions about the emitted machine code, but we expect the output to be stable, in all consequential ways, for a given input and constant optimization settings. (Even in manufacturing, there is allowance for variation due to process, and untold money has been spent variously trying to exorcise or neutralize it. We have it easy.) Importantly, while no single person can know everything about the operation of modern toolchains, we know that there exist people with the education and the inclination to understand anything about them. Compilers and linkers and analyzers are not mysterious black boxes that defy investigation. | | |
| ▲ | win311fwg 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | > In the case of software engineering, source code occupies roughly the same position as a schematic That is a reasonable take, but software engineers don't work at such a low level. They start the agent and their job is to make sure that the agent doesn't go off the rails. It is like driving a train. Hence why we call them engineers. |
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| ▲ | win311fwg a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I fully disagree Disagree about what? You've certainly recognized that professional engineers have tried to usurp the term for their own devices, but that was already called out earlier. There was never a disagreement there. The word "engineer" predates societies of engineers by several hundred years or more so there is no claim that those societies came up with it, so there is nothing to disagree about there either. > Doing a brick layer training doesn't make one a construction builder. If someone goes to a bootcamp and then, following that, sits on the couch watching TV until their end of days then you're right that they would not be an engineer. But I have never seen anyone claim that they are something when they aren't doing it. Someone who worked at McDonalds when they were 14 years old and never again don't still call themselves a fast food worker when they are a 50 year old CEO, so I am not sure this take logically follows. It was implied that there is associated action. | | |
| ▲ | pjmlp a day ago | parent [-] | | Following Leonardo Da Vinci footsteps requires more than what a React Native bootcamp provides. | | |
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| ▲ | w4der a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I had a professor once say that a computer scientist has as much to do with computers as an astronomer has to do with telescopes. | | |
| ▲ | watt 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | you misunderstood or are misquoting it. the actual quote by Dijkstra like this:
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.".
It's indeed not meant to be about the individual practitioner (who has a lot to do with a computer or a telescope), but a remark about the nature of the field itself. | |
| ▲ | ChrisMarshallNY a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Reminds me of the classic The Parable of the Toaster: https://www.glaver.org/ftp/humor/toaster-fable.txt | | |
| ▲ | aleph_minus_one a day ago | parent [-] | | I think this article is highly unfair to computer scientists: - Computer science is about extending our understanding what can be done with computers (including what can be done efficiently). The computer scientist in this story exactly does that: he sees that the usage of the poster is a special case of a much more general pattern, and tries to understand this pattern, so that a solution that is developed for the general case can be applied to all of them, without having to develop a novel solution for every new case, which can save an insane amount of money. - The kind of requirement analysis, and process orientation is rather untypical for computer scientists, but rather for what is called in German "Wirtschaftsinformatiker" (i.e. people who are business process analysts first and programmers second). These are people who are deep in love with such analysis paralysis, not the typical programmer or computer scientist who is often quite suspicious of such concepts. In other words: if your toilet is clogged, you call a plumber, and not an expert in fluid dynamics. | | |
| ▲ | ChrisMarshallNY a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, check out the post date. That's the first recorded instance of that story, and it has undergone metamorphosis, since. People substitute job titles. The common theme is that the first is practice, and the second, theory. This was in the early-ish days of OOP, when people were saying that, to design software, you were to "write a story" on how you want it to go. The nouns were objects, the modifiers, functions, and the verbs, program flow (or something like that. I never used it, as I thought it was silly). That kind of thing was very attractive to upper managers, who dreamed of firing all the filthy engineers, and writing the code, themselves. Sort of like now, with vibe-coding. > plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose | | |
| ▲ | aleph_minus_one a day ago | parent [-] | | > That kind of thing was very attractive to upper managers, who dreamed of firing all the filthy engineers, and writing the code, themselves. I thought managers typically feel "above" writing code themselves. :-) |
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| ▲ | the_af a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | The joke also conflates computer scientists with an architecture astronaut / software engineer (whatever that means, let's say a practitioner who works writing software for a living), which alas! is all too common. |
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| ▲ | Aerolfos a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Astronomers should have quite a lot to do with telescopes. You might say a modern astronomer has little to do with telescopes as imagined by a layperson, that is some glass lenses in a tube on a tripod, but they're still called "telescopes" even when it's a complex arrangement of mirrors housed inside an observatory (or on a satellite, as is the case of the James-Webb telescope). And an astronomer should absolutely have understanding of those, their intricacies, the optical equations involved, and how to operate them (usually with automated software, but astronomers are the ones writing that software). Now an astrophysicist has less to do with telescopes, especially if your field is theoretical cosmology, although they still require familiarity with telescopes, practicalities, how observations are made etc. because that is the basis of their theory. So, a cosmologist vs. an astronomer might be a better analog for a computer scientist vs. a software engineer. And I know that despite doing my own thesis in cosmology, my studies involved a lot of knowledge and teaching about telescopes, including at least one night of observations (it's pretty boring, things are very automated). | |
| ▲ | roelschroeven a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm pretty sure its a quote from Dijkstra. | | |
| ▲ | torcete a day ago | parent [-] | | It is, but maybe he had Dijkstra as a professor. | | |
| ▲ | my-next-account a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not clear who said it first. > I believe that Dijkstra's quote should be attributed to Mike Fellows, since it is fairly clear that Dijkstra heard it from him. Although the earliest appearance in print appears to be in our 1993 article, in my opinion Mike deserves sole attribution. He made up the part that is quoted so widely. I simply tacked on a bit at the end that nobody bothers to quote. Here it is again, correctly attributed for posterity. Says this guy: ianparberry.com/research/cseducation/ But that's 1993, and MIT 6.001 Structure and Interpretation, 1986 has an extremely similar quote (though doesn't actually mention telescope + astronomy). I'm writing this comment live, and I just found this! https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/04/02/computer-science/ Variations of this has been said by many people, over a fairly long period of time. Fascinating :-). | |
| ▲ | w4der 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | He wasn't Dijkstra, but he did know him. |
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| ▲ | ChrisRR a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nowadays computer engineering is more focused on the actual computer than computer science | |
| ▲ | frutiger a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > as an astronomer has to do with telescopes A heck of a lot. Your professor clearly does not know much about astronomy. | | |
| ▲ | roelschroeven a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I think the point is that yes, of course telescopes are important to astronomers, but they're not the essence, they're not what the study is about. They are the tools of the study, not the object of the study. The same can be said about computers and computer science. I don't think I fully agree with that, but it's interesting to think about. | |
| ▲ | tialaramex a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It varies. I used to work for a Physics and Astronomy department, yes, some of them are interested in telescopes, of various sorts, and indeed that's the department running the scheme where lay people can look at interesting stuff in the sky using a mid-size optical telescope. But, there's a lot of deep physics, that's why it's a physics department. At scale some of the physical properties from everyday life we usually don't notice stop being negligible and because we're small that scale is called astronomy. For example if you have a whole bunch of Hydrogen the gravity its exerting on itself is negligible... Unless it's a lot of Hydrogen because eventually instead of being negligible the gravity adds up to where the Hydrogen atoms undergo nuclear fusion and that's how you get stars. Similarly, Oceanography does have boats and a large building next to the sea, but although some of them are capable sailors, a lot of what they're interested in is theoretical and doesn't require you to even be able to smell the sea, let alone go out on it. | | |
| ▲ | frutiger a day ago | parent [-] | | Perfect - your background means I can speak a language you will understand. The reason we know anything about the composition of stars, the distance to galaxies, their relative speed etc. is because we use a telescope and study spectral lines. Your comparison of oceanography and boats is a poor analogy. The a analog to telescopes would be sonar (and maybe seismographs?). The analog to boats would be spaceships/rockets. This makes my point. |
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| ▲ | zombot a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Don't astronomers use telescopes? | | |
| ▲ | passivegains a day ago | parent [-] | | Using telescopes doesn't make them professional telescope makers. You can be a perfectly good astronomer just by using telescopes built and maintained by other people, and you can be a perfectly good telescope manufacturer without publishing peer-reviewed astronomy papers. |
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| ▲ | defrost a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tell him he knows little about astronomy and invite him to watch the latest episode of The Sky at Night - a bunch of astronomers gush over a diverse set of telescopes ... La Palma - Gateway to the Universe (November 9, 2026) The team journey to La Palma, where giant new telescopes and cutting-edge science are opening extraordinary new windows on our universe.
~ https://thetvdb.com/series/the-sky-at-night/episodes/1205884...Roque de los Muchachos Observatory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_de_los_Muchachos_Observa... |
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| ▲ | rjbwork a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | And yet, the amount of slop I've seen produced to solve a problem that is trivially reduced to e.g. graph traversal on more than one occasion is astounding. I tend to think it's got more advantages than disadvantages and we should be gatekeeping harder. |
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| > A lot of modern programs never terminate and thus to me "halting" means no longer able to compute, i.e it's hung/deadlocked. The terminology of the "halting problem" is a very specific term of computer science, and it didn't age badly. This is like saying a reactor "going critical" hasn't aged well because non-physicists don't understand what "critical" means: it's not meant for them. Or about "prime numbers" because non-mathematicians don't know what "prime" means. Or what a "continuous function" is, etc, etc. You get the idea. Modern programs are still composed of functions, and those functions are subject to the halting problem, in the sense that they get inputs and provide outputs. If they don't, they did not "compute" in precisely the sense you meant it. So let's say your videogame or whatever is waiting for input (the joystick or mouse) and you don't provide it, and because it's a turn-based game, nothing else happens. Has it "halted" in the sense we're discussing? Nope. It would be subject to halting if, once you provide input, the program cannot produce the intended result for your input (move a sprite, display "game over", start another round, play an animation, modify internal game state, etc). In other words, Computer Science talks of "programs" but it's really any computation that takes an input and produces an output, and modern programs are made of them, so the problem applies to them. |
