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A comment on Do you actually like programming? Or is it just a means to an end for you?. Parent comment

Re:Do you actually like programming? Or is it just a means ... by amichail on Friday March 13, 2009 @09:04PM (#515530)
In traditional CS, you typically wait for others outside of CS to come up with a novel app (e.g., social networking) and then you try to make it better in some way.

Entrepreneurs come up with the big ideas. Computer scientists tweak those ideas and try to come up with faster, more memory efficient, secure, better structured, etc. implementations.

In fact, if a computer scientist is working on a novel app, then his/her work would not be considered important as he/she is not working on the solution to a well established problem.

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Re:Do you actually like programming? Or is it just a means ... by cperciva on Friday March 13, 2009 @09:15PM (#515535)
In fact, if a computer scientist is working on a novel app, then his/her work would not be considered important as he/she is not working on the solution to a well established problem.

Not at all. Computer scientists invent new problems all the time.

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Re:Do you actually like programming? Or is it just a means ... by amichail on Friday March 13, 2009 @09:16PM (#515538)
And their peers generally don't care.

Also, consider the criteria for having a paper accepted at a prestigious conference. Generally, there must be a non-trivial proof of some sort or strong empirical evaluation. This is a great way to discourage people from submitting novel ideas that are hard to evaluate.

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Re:Do you actually like programming? Or is it just a means ... by scott_s on Thursday March 19, 2009 @06:10PM (#524076)
Some means of demonstrating the fidelity of an idea - either through formal proof or empirical evaluation - is expected of all scientific and engineering papers.

There are lots of interesting ideas that don't work. The value of knowing an interesting idea does work is enormous. Evaluating ideas is the basis of the scientific method.

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