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by maxhallinan 2674 days ago
Ok, I think I read more into your first comment than you actually said.

>many routes are just not focusing on the higher level design skills that I think are needed to make good libraries/frameworks/DSL's.

I have observed that too. But I don't think this is about who is and isn't a computer scientist, whether self-taught or formally trained. I think it's more a change in the way people relate to programming languages. Perhaps programming languages were commonly assumed to be principally an academic topic. Perhaps it's not that more people are becoming computer scientists but that more people are finding non-academic ways to relate to programming language design. I think what Butterick did was to build the tool he needed to do a job (write a book). So language design becomes just like any other form of hacking.

>Why wouldn't the author qualify as a self taught computer scientist though?

Butterick himself is adamant that he is a lay person. He compares himself to a "squirrel in a ferrari": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMz09jYOgoc And that's his point in that talk - Racket makes it possible for even the lay person to build the language they need.
1 comments
wool_gather 2674 days ago
He can view himself however he wants, but the man just wrote an article that competently covers Turing completeness, regular expressions, and Lindemeyer trees, among other things! He's definitely earned his comp sci merit badge, so to speak.
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maxhallinan 2673 days ago
Computer science is a specific treatment of these topics that is based in formalism. Compare John McCarthy's "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I" and Paul Graham's "The Roots of Lisp". These papers cover exactly the same material. But only the first is computer science because it uses a formal language to express the ideas.
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adjkant 2673 days ago
If that's the definition of CS we're using then my original post is a very egregious misnomer. I feel like that definition is way too restrictive though. CS can be formalized and informal, but both are still CS IMO.
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