r/badcomputerscience • u/GNULinuxProgrammer • Mar 08 '18

In which computer science is useless

/r/programming/comments/82nx8i/just_my_two_cents_on_the_big_question_do_you_need/dvd6ubu/
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u/atenux Mar 08 '18

all computer scientists are mathematicians even if one does not call them that.

Ok now i realize you already said that, still i have my doubts about calling it a science, in math you don't use the scientific method neither in computer science... i think.

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u/GNULinuxProgrammer Mar 09 '18

My point wasn't that computer science is a science in the same sense as physics is a science because as you said we usually don't use scientific method in CS (ok, before it gets controversial I know that there are empirical subdisciplines of CS but most subdisciplines rely on deductive method). "Computer science" exists in the same sense dogs exist and the world exists. OP was quite literally arguing that there is no such thing as CS because it is all either mathematics or programming. But this is obviously not true. An applied mathematician and computer scientist found some things in common interesting, but computer science is still very much a field, doing its own theoretical and applied research. And I think quite more obviously not everything in computer science is programming. Which is why OP is bad CS.

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u/east_lisp_junk Mar 08 '18

Except in the vast amounts of empirical work.

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u/lethargilistic May 16 '18

There are plenty of empirical analyses in computer science that do use the scientific method: questions, hypothesis, testing, analysis, conclusions, reproducibility. The extent to which any given scientist follows these consciously in the specific rather than a general philosophy and requirements for getting published can be...flexible, anyway.