On Fri, 14 Apr 2000, Brendan Coffey wrote:
> Computer science is an engineering endeavor. It still boggles me
> that most universities don't teach their CS students the engineering
> design process from an academic perspective.
I never had a class where they've taught me the proper engineering
designs. The closes I've come to it has been Computer Architecture and
Networks but a lot of the material was still theoretical fundamentals.
For instance, the propagation through connection-oriented and
connectionless Channels from networks and the logistics/internals of the
CPU pipeline from architecture are just two things that stick in my mind.
In what aspect is it supposed to be engineering? It terms of writing the
actual code that does the testing? Software Engineering?
> Even people who do the most highly abstract theoretical algorithm
> work have to run their algorithms _on_ something. The hardest of
> the hardcore algorithm analysis kids I've known know unix system
> internals inside out. They have to.
It depends on the interest of their hypothesis/theories. Ideas such as a
better data structure or a better algorithm that does data manipulation,
IMO, does not require knowledge of system internals unless they will
greatly improve the results. Although I know a lot about OS internals, I
have never used them in my research or my Computer Science Career.
One thing that I've vexing is that I depend on the Hardware engineers to
give that extra floating point I need to make my ideas run faster. =) I
think they're just amazing.
> If people want to be in "computer science" without _actually_
> learning how a computer works, that's what the mathematics department
> is for. ;-) Myself, I like both. Double major in CS and Math
> for me.
I'll stick with Computer Science, if I could. =) Math is just something
that comes naturally to me when I _need_ it, I don't want it to be my
life. heh. The most math I've ever encountered in my studies has been in
computer graphics, algorithm, and data structure studies.
Beverly
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