TITLE: Does Computer Science Have a Culture?
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: August 17, 2010  5:33 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Zed Shaw is known for his rants.  I've enjoyed many of
them over the years.  However, his
<A HREF="http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1275258018.html">
   Go To University, Not For CS</A>
hits awfully close to home.  I love his defense of a
university education, but he doesn't have much good to say
about computer science programs.  This is the punchline:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
This is why you go to a University and also why you should
not study Computer Science.  Except for a few places like
MIT, Computer Science is a pointless discipline with no
culture.  Everything is borrowed from somewhere else.
It's the ultimate post modern discipline, and nobody
teaching it seems to know what the hell "post-modernism"
even means.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

He is perhaps a bit harsh, yet what counterargument might
we offer?  If you studied computer science, did your
undergrad alma mater or your graduate school have a CS
culture?  Did any of your professors offer a coherent
picture of CS as a serious intellectual discipline, worthy
of study independent of specific technologies and languages?

In graduate school, my advisor and I talked philosophically
about CS, artificial intelligence, and knowledge in a way
that stoked my interest in computing as a coherent
discipline.  A few of my colleagues shared our interests,
but many of fellow graduate students were more interested
in specific problems and solutions.  They viewed our
philosophical explorations as diversions from the main
attraction.

Unfortunately, when I look around at undergrad CS programs,
I rarely see a CS culture.  This true of what I see at my
own university, at my friends' schools, and at schools I
encounter professionally.  Some programs do better than
others, but most of us could do better.  Some of our
students would appreciate the intellectual challenge that
is computer science beyond installing the latest version
of Linux or making Eclipse work with SVN.

Shaw offers one sentence of great advice for those of us
thinking about undergrad curriculum:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
...  the things that are core to Computer Science like
language design, parsing, or state machines, aren't even
taught unless you take an "advanced" course.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I feel his pain.  Few schools seem willing to design a
curriculum built around core ideas packaged any differently
from the way they were packaged in 1980.  Students can
graduate from most CS programs in this country without
studying language design or parsing in any depth.

I can offer one counterpoint: some of us do know what
post-modernism is and means.  Larry Wall calls Perl
<A HREF="http://www.wall.org/%7Elarry/pm.html">
   the first postmodern computer language</A>.
More insightful to me, though, is work by James Noble
and Robert Biddle, in particular
<A HREF="http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/comp/Publications/CS-TR-02-9.abs.html">
   Notes on Notes on Postmodern Programming</A>,
which I
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-10.html#e2004-10-26T23_08_52.htm">
   mentioned briefly</A>
a few years ago.

Shaw is right: there can be great value in studying at
a university.  We need to make sure that computer
science students receive all of the value they should.
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