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by lou1306 1566 days ago
This article just goes to show that, when people hear about "computer science", they think that it only refers to actual hardware computers. Case in point, the reference about "many [...] innovations around computer architecture".

Computer science is about the mechanized manipulation of symbols. Turing proposed a fundamental model to reason about this. He wasn't trying to glorify tabulating machines into mathematical ones; rather, he was solving the Entscheidungsproblem, like a lot of other people. In the circle of logicians, philosophers and mathematicians that cared for this issue (the proto-computer scientists, in a sense), he has never been "obscure".
1 comments
jcranmer 1565 days ago
To expand on your point here: there are generally two inroads into computer science from other disciplines. You can view it is an extension of electrical engineering and the actual development of computing hardware, or you can view it as a development of an "applied math" curriculum.

From that viewpoint, the article here is mostly complaining that Turing has had little impact on the development of computer science if you only look at it from the first perspective. Except the ACM in particular generally hews more towards the second perspective--of the ~50 Turing Awards, at best a dozen of them aren't heavily rooted in a view from the second perspective.

In other words, this amounts to a complaint that the organization that honors the people who make contributions to the math-y side of computer science names its award for doing so after the one of the most important math-y contributors of computer science as opposed to one of the people who actually built contributors.

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tbrownaw 1565 days ago
But that first viewpoint is called Computer Engineering, and is distinct from Computer Science.
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skavi 1565 days ago
As distinct as two neighboring disciplines can be. (not very much IMO)
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lou1306 1565 days ago
Good point. Of course, one may retort that Turing also contributed to the second perspective. Sure, his work at Bletchley Park was secret for a while, but his involvement in developing the Ferranti Mark 1 [1] was well known.

[1] https://www.turing.org.uk/scrapbook/manmach.html

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