cdshaw@alberta.UUCP (Chris Shaw) (04/26/88)
In article <7657@ames.arpa> eugene@pioneer.UUCP (Eugene N. Miya) writes: > He <physicist> has only programmed on three machines his entire life ... This is probably the cause of his myopia. No doubt he has done only physics on those machines, too. The converse to the old adage "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" is also true: "If all your jobs consist of hammering nails, screwdrivers start to look pretty useless". >...and this (standards) is why computer science will not be a science. I think he is right: Computer Science Isn't. But then again, neither is Mathematics. To my mind at least, using the scientific method doesn't make you a scientist. Both Computer and Math are "Technical Philosophy". They both have specialized languages, they are both abstract (at the cutting edge), they are both useful for other things, and both are entirely artificial. Neither Math nor CS rely an any principal of nature for their makeup. Of course, this isn't to imply that you can build machines independent of nature; that's where the engineering part of CS comes in. Engineering types of constraints feed back into the kind of software you can write, and so on. But as far as THEORY is concerned, CS isn't science. >I guess the question is largely one of the generality of computer >experience. Do machines completely bias the way we think about computers. A particular machine will ENTIRELY bias the way you think about computers. Especially if you use the same machine 8 hours a day for a number of years. You end up internalizing SO MUCH notation that you think it was invented by God himself. When the change comes, you have to convert. Almost like becoming Born Again, or something. It is a deep change to make, not a trivial change. There's a lot of psychology going on here. That obviously includes the designers. The trick is to remain "professional" about it and look at evidence when making design decisions. Experience just cuts down on your search time. >--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@ames-aurora.ARPA -- Chris Shaw cdshaw@alberta.UUCP (via watmath, ihnp4 or ubc-vision) University of Alberta CatchPhrase: Bogus as HELL !