When in school, I used to hear it said that CS was the bastard child of Math and Electrical Engineering. It's fairly fundamental: Turing's take on the Church-Turing Thesis is a very engineering-oriented (the Turing Machine) and Church's take (and McCarthy's implementation, LISP) is barely out of mathematical notation.
Similarly, I've been saying for a while that "All Science is Computer Science" because practically everything that could be learned without computer assistance has been covered by an ever-growing number of scientists for a long time. Yes, that's hyperbole, but for a great many fields (Cook mentions Bioinformatics, a field close to my paycheck) it is very true.
If Computer Science is to be diffused across all disciplines (Processing makes a case for CS in Art, etc.) then what is the use of the CS department? Well, when you get into "Programming for Bioinformatics", "Programming for Physics", "Programming for Dietetics", there is a raft of common knowledge. Also, for all the comments that college isn't a trade school, a great number of people who go through treating it pretty much as one. One could argue that people have gone through Computer Science because Software Engineering programs haven't been available.
Anyway, as this is the 50th Anniversary of the country's oldest Department of Computer Science (Oct. 5 in Lawson. Go Boilers!), I think this something worth thinking about.
Similarly, I've been saying for a while that "All Science is Computer Science" because practically everything that could be learned without computer assistance has been covered by an ever-growing number of scientists for a long time. Yes, that's hyperbole, but for a great many fields (Cook mentions Bioinformatics, a field close to my paycheck) it is very true.
If Computer Science is to be diffused across all disciplines (Processing makes a case for CS in Art, etc.) then what is the use of the CS department? Well, when you get into "Programming for Bioinformatics", "Programming for Physics", "Programming for Dietetics", there is a raft of common knowledge. Also, for all the comments that college isn't a trade school, a great number of people who go through treating it pretty much as one. One could argue that people have gone through Computer Science because Software Engineering programs haven't been available.
Anyway, as this is the 50th Anniversary of the country's oldest Department of Computer Science (Oct. 5 in Lawson. Go Boilers!), I think this something worth thinking about.
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