[blah32497]

"CS is a hard science"

Hahaha. As someone who did a degree in physics, computer "science" is a joke when it comes to math. They took one of the easiest field of mathematics and rolled it in to a half-assed degree. Sure you learn some logic and some graph theory (yeah, lets try to avoid numbers as much as possible...) but it's not at a very high level. I seriously doubt CS professors are making significant contributions to mathematics.

"there is a fundamental disconnect between what you seem to think you should be learning and what is actually being taught"

Yeah. That was the point of what I wrote. There is also a disconnect between what academia wants to teach, and the tools that the students need to actually learn the concepts.

It's like teaching an Literature class without actually teaching people how to write. Code is our primary tool for expressing algorithms and concepts. If you hamper people's ability to write code, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

[fredophile]

Why do you say CS takes one of the easiest fields in mathematics? People have been studying CS since long before we had computers and there are still famous open problems. If the math is so easy perhaps you'd like to give a proof for P=NP (or P!=NP) and claim your million dollars? Do you really think CS is all discrete math and graph theory? I don't go around claiming physics is easy because Newtonian mechanics are simple. I'd also argue that math only gets interesting once you take the numbers away. If all you're doing is number crunching you should probably just write some code instead. Computers are good at that sort of thing.

In my experience the real disconnect with CS degrees is expectations about what is and what should be taught. A lot of students want a vocational program. Universities end up teaching a hodgepodge of topics such as how to write code in a particular language, program design/software engineering, algorithms and complexity, discipline specific specialties (e.g. AI, OSes), computability, etc.

When I was in university I was taught how to debug my code with ddd and gdb. Was this a waste of my time because I no longer use them? Of course not. Everything I learned with them carries over to the debuggers I use everyday. My degree also covered several languages that I've never used outside of classes. The skills I learned learning them help me any time I want to pick up a new language and start coding.

Code is not a primary tool for expressing algorithms and concepts. Code is how I tell the computer what to do. If code was so good for communicating concepts and algorithms to other people I wouldn't need to write comments. I also haven't seen any algorithm books that include real code. The closest you'll get there is MIX. Good luck programming a real application in that.

[mkartic]

Why the bitterness against CS?

As jarvic says,

> However, CS and software development are not the same thing.

A lot of schools offer a separate degree in Software engineering as opposed to CS (or at least separate tracks). So the distinction is pretty clear. Where I studied, there are separate degrees for CS and IT. You seem to be fudging the two. Do you expect physics majors to be mechanical engineers automatically?

CS degrees teach you algorithms, not how to write code in Java. Doesn't matter what IDE/language you're using, bubble sort is going to be slower than quicksort for large lists.

Yes, unfortunately most people who do CS end up becoming IT drones. That's the nature of the industry, not the CS program's fault. As a matter of interest, what do most physics majors become? I'm sure there aren't enough professorships available.

Or in the words of E.W.Dijkstra: “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”

[blah32497]

Sorry if I came off as bitter. I'm a couple of years out of college and honest I felt that the CS department was pretty self entitled and misguided.

"CS degrees teach you algorithms"

Yeah it does. And it doesn't feel like it's really enough. There isn't a feeling by the end that you've learned only a small fraction of the algorithms and I guess it felt like there wasn't all that much science.

I went to a school with a decent department (I think top 20 in the US) but I never felt like they were actually doing any real, interesting, groundbreaking research.

In contrast, the Physics department is doing all sorts of stuff. Quantum computing, CERN related stuff, building new astronomical sensors, string theory stuff etc. etc. They've got their own problems, but at least it's something you can point to.

Physics majors are sorta screwed. Physics is sorta the opposite of CS. When you're done you feel like you've only learned a tiny bit and that there is so much more to understand. If you're not trying to go to grad school, the department doesn't really care about you. You end up having no marketable skills and your selling point is "I-went-through-a-insanely-difficult-degree-and-i'm-good-at-problem-solving". Most people can sorta code in Python, and sorta can do some circuit stuff. It's pretty bad.

People end up teaching, or working in unrelated jobs. Or going to grad school in related disciplines. One of my buddies ended up picking grapes with illegal immigrants.

[jarvic]

Disclaimer: I'm a CS PhD student that did pure math in undergrad, so I probably have a different perspective on these things than someone who did CS only.

CS, at a graduate level, is a much more varied field than most people, even CS undergrads, realize. In fact, a lot of the main research groups in my department (graphics, vision, image analysis, robotics, VR, visualization) are things most CS undergrads don't even get exposed to.

In math or physics, a lot of the undergrad courses are kind of basic, entry-level things that give you a feel for some of the different fields of research without going too far in depth. This isn't really the case with CS, because CS departments have to cater to several different audiences who tend to fall into one degree. They have to come up with a curriculum that balances programming/development concepts for people who want to be developers, networking/administration stuff for people who want to be IT (although this is more and more being moved into a separate program), and theory for people who actually want to be computer scientists. Even then, this theory is mostly relegated to computation theory, which is only a small part of what research computer scientists do.

Personally, I'm in medical image analysis, which is a field which is a collision between a ton of different areas, including physics, statistics, operations research[1], numerical analysis, image processing, differential geometry, and medicine. I don't know that I would consider any of those fields to be the "easiest branch of mathematics" (what does that even mean, anyway?)

This post has kind of gotten off the rails a little bit, so I'll end with this: I think, if you just look at a CS undergrad program and try to project that to what actual CS research is like, you end up getting a much narrower and incomplete picture than if you do the same thing to a math or physics department, partly because CS research tends to be much more interdisciplinary than others (I have many more collaborators in many more areas than some friends of mine in math/physics/biology do).

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research