CS may be mathematics but programming certainly isn't
If you're discussing pure CS, the thing you can write down in a book and for which a computer is a largely theoretical device, sure CS is mathematics.
If we're talking about the practical reality that CS majors in America today are trying to achieve, and their undergraduate programs are trying to prepare them for, that's becoming a working programmer and has very little relation to mathematics.
Re:The Mathematical Hacker
by __MatrixMan__ on Saturday December 24, 2022 @01:08AM
(#34114452)
I wish we'd just start issuing software engineering degrees so it would be easier to get an actual computer science education.
Re:The Mathematical Hacker
by eternityforest on Saturday December 24, 2022 @08:45AM
(#34116721)
A* is already intermediate level programming. CS is math because it's what we call the parts of programming that are math.
But so much of programming isn't. It doesn't require deep understanding, static analysers are advanced level things that are way beyond what many working programmers ever encounter.
I can't say I've ever seen "Real math" myself.
For example, take any good static analyzer that implements abstract interpretation. It generally works using Galois connections, which is just abstract algebra.
Dijkstra's algorithm or A* came pretty early in the history of CS. It would be fair to compare their difficulty to something similar in mathematics, say some basic results in Euclidean geometry.