Computer science

Computer science or computing science (abbreviated CS) is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. Computer scientists invent algorithmic processes that create, describe, and transform information and formulate suitable abstractions to model complex systems.

Sourced

• Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
  • Michael R. Fellows [1]
  • Often misattributed to Edsger Dijkstra.
  • This quote was first published in "SIGACT trying to get children excited about CS", Fellows, M.R., and Parberry, I., January 1993, Computing Research News. In full: "What would we like our children- the general public of the future—to learn about computer science in schools? We need to do away with the myth that computer science is about computers. Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools, it is about how we use them and what we find out when we do."

• Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection.
  • David Wheeler (Attributed in: Butler Lampson. Principles for Computer System Design. Turing Award Lecture. February 17, 1993.)
  • Also (mis)attributed to Butler Lampson.
  • Wheeler is said to have added the appendage "Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection."
  • Also "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection". (Diomidis Spinellis. "Chapter 17. Another Level of Indirection". Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think. O'Reilly Media. June 2007.)
  • "Indirection" is often changed to "abstraction".
  • Called the fundamental theorem of software engineering by Andrew Koenig.

• Anything which uses science as part of its name isn't: political science, creation science, computer science.
  • Hal Abelson, attributed by Ernest N. Prabhakar in an e-mail

• Computer science also differs from physics in that it is not actually a science. It does not study natural objects. Neither is it, as you might think, mathematics; although it does use mathematical reasoning pretty extensively. Rather, computer science is like engineering; it is all about getting something to do something, rather than just dealing with abstractions, as in the pre-Smith geology.
  • Richard Feynman, Feynman Lectures on Computation, 1970

• Software engineering is the part of computer science which is too difficult for the computer scientist.
  • Friedrich Bauer, "Software Engineering." Information Processing: Proceedings of the IFIP Congress 1971, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, August 23-28, 1971.

• Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
  • Edsger Dijkstra, J.N. Buxton and B. Randell, eds, Software Engineering Techniques, April 1970, p. 16. Report on a conference sponsored by the NATO Science Committee, Rome, Italy, 27–31 October 1969. Possibly the earliest documented use of the famous quote.

One Man's View of Computer Science (1969)

Richard Hamming, 1968 Turing Award lecture, Journal of the ACM 16 (1), January 1969, p. 3–12

• The only generally agreed upon definition of mathematics is "Mathematics is what mathematician's do." [...]
  In the face of this difficulty [of defining "computer science"] many people, including myself at times, feel that we should ignore the discussion and get on with doing it. But as George Forsythe points out so well in a recent article*, it does matter what people in Washington D.C. think computer science is. According to him, they tend to feel that it is a part of applied mathematics and therefore turn to the mathematicians for advice in the granting of funds. And it is not greatly different elsewhere; in both industry and the universities you can often still see traces of where computing first started, whether in electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, or even business. Evidently the picture which people have of a subject can significantly affect its subsequent development. Therefore, although we cannot hope to settle the question definitively, we need frequently to examine and to air our views on what our subject is and should become.
  • *Hamming cites Forsythe, G.E., "What to do until the computer scientist comes", Am. Math. Monthly 75 (5), May 1968, p. 454-461.

• Without real experience in using the computer to get useful results the computer science major is apt to know all about the marvelous tool except how to use it. Such a person is a mere technician, skilled in manipulating the tool but with little sense of how and when to use it for its basic purposes.

• Indeed, one of my major complaints about the computer field is that whereas Newton could say, "If I have seen a little farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants," I am forced to say, "Today we stand on each other's feet." Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way. Science is supposed to be cumulative, not almost endless duplication of the same kind of things.

See also

• Algorithms
• Artificial intelligence
• Computers
• Programming languages