dylan@june.cs.washington.edu (Dylan McNamee) (04/09/91)
Does anyone know of a ML or Miranda port to the amiga? They'd be neat,
at least for classwork.
Here's an inflamatory generalization, extending ... "real programmers
use assembly, but Computer Scientists use the Right Tool for the job."
The point being that there seems to be a real and growing distinction
between computer scientists and programmers.
--
dylan mcnamee / "Ten Years After WWIV...there wasn't much to do;
dylan@cs.washington.edu \/all the bowling alleys were wrecked, so I spent most
of my time looking for beer" from Strange Brewbarrett@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Dan Barrett) (04/09/91)
In article <1991Apr8.233744.16904@beaver.cs.washington.edu> dylan@june.cs.washington.edu (Dylan McNamee) writes: >...that there seems to be a real and growing distinction >between computer scientists and programmers. There is a huge distinction. CS and programming are 2 very different subjects that just happen to overlap. Another example of 2 related but different subjects that overlap are automobile repair and racecar driving, or mathematics and the use of calculators. (I am NOT making a statement about the relative difficulties of CS and programming. Both are hard.) I will not attempt to define "computer science", because different people have different definitions. I know this because I took a survey of several dozen computer scientists and programmers, and asked their opinions! If I had to summarize the responses, I'd say this: A major part of Computer Science is the study of what IS and IS NOT "computable". There exist some simply-stated calculations that simply cannot be solved by computers, even if computers became 10,000,000 times faster and worked for a trillion years. Programming does not address this subject directly at all: it involves only problems whose solutions ARE computable. You do not need to know computer science to be able to write a computer program. You do not need to be a programmer to be a computer scientist. However, knowledge of both subjects makes you better and more well-rounded at both. In my humble opinion, a person who wants to be an excellent programmer should also study computer science. An excellent computer scientist, however, really doesn't need to know how to write code. Another difference. This is definitely the wrong newsgroup for this discussion, so I have directed followups to comp.misc. Dan //////////////////////////////////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ | Dan Barrett, Department of Computer Science Johns Hopkins University | | INTERNET: barrett@cs.jhu.edu | | | COMPUSERVE: >internet:barrett@cs.jhu.edu | UUCP: barrett@jhunix.UUCP | \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\/////////////////////////////////////