6 ms·

Computer science is a liberal arts degree

92 points by mbellotti 4y ago

eimrine 4y ago
Pentarivium?
ggm 4y ago
In Ireland, computer scientists who wrote programs were deemed writers and qualified for Irish arts tax treatment, in the 70s
- ealexhudson 4y ago
  Copyright, still today and across much of the world, is based on the concepts of authorship and publishing. It works in software in practically the same way as literature.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Ah yes the software developer jack of all trades now needs to add more skills to their bow. Or just hire people in the role of UX design as a specific profession
- spacemanmatt 4y ago
  My life as a full-stacker: When I have to install the database, write the schema, write the app, write the DR policy, and eventually also argue for another developer, I get context switching fatigue and become susceptible to external recruitment.
cjdrake 4y ago
No, it's not.
psyc 4y ago
Clickbait. Article says it should be. To which I say: the fuck it should. Is a law degree a liberal arts degree? If universities decide CS needs to include some instruction in the human side, they can offer those classes without reclassifying CS as some bullshit.
- lthornberry 4y ago
  In the US, law is a graduate degree. A significant majority of law school students already have a liberal arts degree. This is an entirely different case. On the other point, offering CS degrees as liberal arts degrees wouldn't meant "reclassifying CS as some bullshit" (or, indeed, reclassifying CS at all). There are many fields where some colleges already choose to offer the major as a B.A. while others offer it as a B.S. It's not a difference in the field, it's a difference in what requirements a college implements for getting a degree in the field. In other words, exactly what you suggested should happen.
dijit 4y ago
I think the author is conflating vocational education with university curriculum. It is often the case that universities offer courses that are much more theoretical than the practical application, even medical studies to some extent begin with very high level concepts and theories; the reason for this is because they’re attempting to optimise for better understanding of the underlying foundations of the discipline than for any particular job. Vocational qualifications are extremely handy, but they have a bit of a bad reputation these days. Code academies are not seen as prestigious, despite being the authors ideal. The game assembly (TGA) is one such vocational studies program in southern Sweden with an excellent reputation in the local community for churning out quality (junior) game devs that are ready to work, but suffers with backend programming sections still; since most people who do game dev do not enter to be in the backend. I would be extremely happy to return to apprenticeships, I would have killed for one going into this industry, but given that employers only care about getting new mid-levels or seniors and not investing in what they already have: it’s always going to be a losing battle as the invested talent atrophies and leaves to go to other places.
- chmod600 4y ago
  From the article: "If the point of a CS education is to prepare people to work in software (and that assertion is debatable!)" The author uses a premise, while acknowledging that the reader might not agree with the premise. That's not conflating anything. And the author's suggestions are far from "vocational"... they just move out of the limited field we call computer science.
- savolai 4y ago
  That’s not the point of view the author is advocating though. It’s not that they think CS is not practical enough. To me, what they’re saying is that CS has a point of view that is so narrow and constructed from such a limited perspective that it’s actually harmful to society as a whole. i.e. CS is removed from science as a whole, not by virtue of being too theoretical but as a result of being applied, but in a very skewed fashion. CS practitioners have a lot of power in society and ethical norms are lacking, so this has consequences.
- fullshark 4y ago
mbaytas 4y ago
There is a branch of computer science, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), where exactly the ideas in this article have been playing out for a few decades already. Earlier this year I wrote about HCI as the intersection of technical craft and social sciences: https://www.designdisciplin.com/hci-profession/ https://www.designdisciplin.com/hci-profession/ Interestingly the responses I got from people in the HCI field was the inverse of the sentiment in this article. Here it seems that the author is arguing to increase social sciences in CS, and getting pushback. One of my arguments was to increase tech/eng competences in HCI, and I got pushback on that too.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > Earlier this year I wrote about HCI as the intersection of technical craft and social sciences. Interestingly the responses I got from people in the HCI field was the inverse of the sentiment in this article (...) I got pushback on that too. Some things seem defined not just by intersection but by exclusion. I've experienced both sides. As a computer scientist working in arts and music, I find the "computer music" field builds on a strong affinity. Technology and arts form a natural positive bond, although one meets the occasional purist who only hand-carves their own medieval flutes. It's a fusion intersection to which one can never bring too much humanities nor science. I don't feel out of place discussing philosophy and matrix multiplication in the same breath. As I matured my interests post 2013 changed focus to digital rights and cybersecurity. It seems to me this area is currently defined by antagonism. It is a human-computer design field, yet is a chasm between human values and rigid thinking where people and systems clash. In computer music, what is at stake is mostly joy. In cybersecurity what is at stake is power. As in any struggle the technocrats just wanna "hit them harder with more". More cryptography. More lockdown. More central authority. The actual utility, or god forbid 'pleasure' of computing be damned. But there is another movement emerging in cybersecurity, to which I am affiliated. "Computing in the public interest", or "humanistic computing", whatever you want to call it, where technical concerns are fused on an equal basis with rights, freedoms and responsibilities. Existing dead centre of that exclusion means getting push-back from both sides. But, to be honest I take that as confirmation that the work is fresh, valid, and essential.
drewcoo 4y ago
So CS has some special need for academic cross-pollination that math and engineering don't share. If so, I'm shocked. Bellotti asserted this several times without anything to substantiate the claim. Kill It with Fire was on my reading list. I think I want to read more reviews now.
- tonnydourado 4y ago
  Have you heard of Facebook?
creakingstairs 4y ago
I think we should leave comp sci as what it is. > The bulk of software work today is about integrating computation into human driven tasks, predicting and anticipating how people think, what they need, how they react to new communication and work methods Sure. But that is not what comp sci is about. If one wants better programmers then those aspect should be put in a different, more job focused, degrees like Software Engineering. It’s should be a choice. If people want to focus on maths and computers, then let them focus on maths and computers without other fields. Degrees aren’t just about jobs.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  > Degrees aren’t just about jobs But degrees are used as a gatekeeper for jobs, and the price of a degree, 4 years of lost earnings + $200K, means that the only practical reason to get one, for the vast majority of people, is to get a higher paying job. So in reality, degrees are about jobs, and universities should start acting like it. I do share your sentiment that it shouldn't be this way, but if you tried to get rid of this system of degrees as job qualifications, the universities would be your main opponent. A degree not about getting a job would have to be more like 1 year & $20K to really get many takers, and that would be much less money and power for the university.
  - creakingstairs 4y ago
    I agree with you mostly. But some random thoughts. > 4 years of lost earnings + $200K Yeah I forgot how much US universities cost. I did a double major in LLB and BA and my student loan at the end was less than 50k including some living costs. I can see why people in US are more focused on job qualification side of a degree if the opportunity cost was that much.
    - seoaeu 4y ago
      Yeah, anyone saying that you shouldn’t think about money when making perhaps the single largest expenditure in your life* probably doesn’t have your best interests in mind. * admittedly, a lot of people buy homes that cost more. Still probably in the top 5.
ukj 4y ago
Yes it is a liberal arts degree: no humans - no need for computation. Understanding ourselves and our needs is necessary for inventing; improving or sustaining any technology. Yes it is a STEM degree: no rigor - no computation. Understanding how the universe works is necessary in order to exploit matter and convince it to do computations for us. Everything humans do (STEM included) is for humans; and by humans. This bipartisan view of universities and faux-conflict isn’t useful.
- eimrine 4y ago
  > no humans - no need for computation. I would disagree with this statement. I have a pet AI program which can get some work done and gain some cryptocurrencies for that and pay for its hosting for keep doing that work. I am sure the AI will overlive all the humans and it really needs some computations for living.
  - ukj 4y ago
    I disagree with your disagreement. Why do humans need/invent computation, hosting, cryptocurrencies and AI? I can’t fathom any data center remaining online for more than a few weeks/months if all humans keeping it running magically disappeared.
    - eimrine 4y ago
      > Why do humans need/invent computation, hosting, cryptocurrencies and AI? Because they use to have some spare time? > I can’t fathom any data center remaining online for more than a few weeks/months if all humans keeping it running magically disappeared. That few weeks my pet AI will be refusing your statement that no human means no need for computations.
      - ukj 4y ago
        Then step aside and take a vow of silence. Let me speak with your AI. Let it refute me by telling me about it’s needs. Queue excuses…
- 4y ago
athrowaway3z 4y ago
Not entirely related here, but fwiw historically most European CS split from the math department and in the US most were split off from the electrical engineering department. Every now and then you notice it in what people do and do not know.
bloodyplonker22 4y ago
- ukj 4y ago
  In the “woke” world of computation this sentence is false. And the previous sentence is true. The liar’s paradox, decidability and undecidability (being core ideas in computer science) directly imply that it is scientifically undecidable what a man; or a woman is. Those are (in fact) questions for the liberal arts department and broader society, and the answers are usually settled by social convention and democratic discourse. A computer scientist will likely understand why the above is true. The rest might be tempted to downvote this assault on their intuitions. Update: 3 people who don’t understand computer science disapprove of this comment (this is a running score)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ycombinete 4y ago
    Your comment is confusingly written. I have no idea what you’re talking about, or what sentences you are referring to. Also, you’ll collect a lot more downvotes now that you’re obnoxiously talking about your downvotes.
    - ukj 4y ago
      What is confusing you about my comment? People who understand computer science also understand exactly what I am talking about. Because I explicitly said what I am talking about: undecidability. It is scientifically undecidable what a man; or a woman is. That is a question for the liberal arts and broader society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem
      - seoaeu 4y ago
        Your comment is written like a logic puzzle rather than as prose that’s meant to make sense. Well, at least the start of it is, which can be enough to persuade someone to stop reading an move on
spacemanmatt 4y ago
Application development is a blended skill and computer science is not the only discipline involved. CS is a mathematical science, not a liberal arts topic. This author is way off base.
- curt15 4y ago
  Mathematics itself is half science and half art.
  - samarama 4y ago
    Mathematics is the most science and least art form possible. Every other field of study has more artsiness than Mathematics. However, Mathematics also still has a lot of artsiness to it.
    - apocadam 4y ago
      Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician. [Upon hearing that one of his students had dropped out to study poetry] - David Hilbert
      - samarama 4y ago
        Do you have an example of an academic field of study that is less of an art and more structured than Mathematics?
    - eimrine 4y ago
      Totally disagree. Mathematics is not a science at all because there is no any possible experiments in the Math fields. And remember what David Hilbert has told about one of his students who decided to go into arts instead of keep learning Math with him. He told "he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician".
      - yesenadam 4y ago
        > there is no any possible experiments in the Math fields. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_mathematics Worth googling too, a wide range of things come up: https://www.google.com/search?q=experimental+mathematics https://www.google.com/search?q=experimental+mathematics
denton-scratch 4y ago
Social Science, Ergonomics and Psychology aren't liberal arts subjects. Mediaeval History, French Literature and (arguably) Architecture are examples of liberal arts. I think there's an argument to be made that computer scientists benefit from studying liberal arts; but I think the author fails to make that argument (let alone that CS is actually liberal arts, as per the subject).
- blululu 4y ago
  Recommending a book on Marketing Science at the end is what really annoyed me the most about this.
- spacemanmatt 4y ago
  I can comfortably get on board with your analysis that there is an argument to be made but this author fails to make it.
- eimrine 4y ago
  > Mediaeval History, French Literature and (arguably) Architecture are examples of liberal arts. Wait a minute, what of 7 liberal arts are History and Literature in? I can not see any place for that in both Trivium and Quadrivium.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    Trivium and Quadrivium aren't really liberal arts, at least not any more. Trivium was logic, grammar and rhetoric - the basics for understanding and making arguments; quadrivium was music, astronomy, geometry and arithmetic - the "proper" subjects that one might want to argue about. I'd be inclined to count astronomy, geometry and arithmetic as STEM subjects, rather than liberal arts. But I don't think trivium and quadrivium have been a thing since the Middle Ages, and I'm sure that's not what the author was referring to.
bjornsing 4y ago
This is the direction things have been going in Sweden over the last 15 years, but I think it’s a shame and a waste of human potential. Why would you need a university CS degree to do UX design and write some JavaScript? There should be other degrees for that to be honest. I’m hoping this trend will now reverse and “real” software engineers will reclaim their profession, despite now being in the “minority”. Personally I’ve started calling myself a “deep tech software engineering entrepreneur” to try and distance myself from this “majority” of overeducated JavaScript fiddlers.
- triyambakam 4y ago
  Vad...? I would have no idea what you intend by calling yourself that if I hadn't read your comment. What's the problem with having a computer science education and writing JS? There are ample situations to utilize CS in browser code.
blululu 4y ago
Yes, but not as the author describes it. The author has a very narrow and circumscribed view of liberal arts. Going back to the beginnings: The “liberal” in Liberal Arts comes from liberate. The arts that free the soul. In its original formulation it had the trivium (rhetoric, grammar, logic) and the quadrivium (geometry, astronomy, music, arithmetic). People like the author commonly associate the whole project with a narrow subset. Well rounded does not just mean we eliminated math from the ciriculum. It should be obvious to most people here that computer science is essential for this in the modern age.
- mathteddybear 4y ago
  Indeed computer science is not trivial.
somewhereoutth 4y ago
CS is not a science, certainly not mathematics, it is not about 'seeking the deeper beauty of our [for mathematics: any] reality'. CS is not engineering, not much actual science or working principles get applied for most of the work done. CS is design, but design of a 4D artifact, something that moves in time and space, not just 3D. To make things more tractable, we do this in discreet space, not continuous space, which brings its own qualities and issues (e.g. non-locality - there is no underlying strata based on nearness). Design is concerned also with the who and the why, rather than just the what and the how. Hence a broad education is helpful.
- spacemanmatt 4y ago
  Is there some way to explain to me, a college dropout, why mathematics is a natural science but computations is not?
  - popcube 4y ago
    because math is too difficult to I can't understand what they usually do
t_mann 4y ago
CS is liberal arts because software is used by humans? By that standard pretty much any degree qualifies as liberal arts, including medicine, engineering, law,... Tbf, that kind of thinking actually goes back to the origins of medieval universities, so there is some case to be made (a lot of universities still award BAs for pretty much every subject). But I guess the true intention here is to lower the barrier in technical terms for claiming CS degrees and SE salaries.
- ukj 4y ago
  Not just software. All knowledge (computer science, mathematics, physics, biology, etc.) is used by humans. To what end? That is not a scientific question. To steal the sentiment from a meme. Scientist: what is philosophy good for? Philosopher: I don’t know. What is science good for? Scientist: Well science has broad application in… Philosopher: aaaand you are doing philosophy *drops mic*
  - spacemanmatt 4y ago
    > aaaand you are doing philosophy drops mic That approach has been used for great justice in my recent work/life. When you can see that far ahead in the argument because you are correct, you just lead your conversation partner to make your point for you.
nxrabl 4y ago
A lot of folks here seem to have a real rose-tinted idea of what CS degrees are actually like. If you took CS more than 10, 15 years ago, you might remember it as a scrappy, fringey degree program, maybe splintered off from Electrical Engineering, a refuge for mathematically-minded nerds to find beauty in the cold algorithmic elegance of computation. That is not what it is anymore, not now that everyone knows you can make six figures right out of college with a CS degree on your CV. At the college I went to, CS is the second largest program, on track to be the largest in the next few years, and Intro to CS is the single most popular class on campus. They cannot hire professors fast enough. They're launching their own coding bootcamp just to keep up with demand. A lot of people are getting this education, and we need to look at what we're teaching them. And what's on the curriculum? Some good hard math, but also a fair bit of nonsense. Some people in this thread seem to think colleges have been taken over by javascript, and that may be true in some places, but I wish they'd taught us JS, because what they taught me was Java Swing, because a decade ago the ivory-tower tenured professor who wrote that course thought it would be useful for getting us a job and never touched it again. They could've replaced that course with underwater basketweaving and nothing of value would've been lost, let alone any of the excellent humanities topics the author mentions in her post. There is plenty of space in the curriculum to clear out enterprise-driven cruft from fifteen years ago and replace it with some of the useful things the author mentions, without touching any of the core mathematics we all love. In fact I would go a step further: Having a lot of people who are very good at programming but who don't know anything else is a bad thing for society. This is unique to programming as a discipline - programmers have historically unprecedented power to turn fuzzy, implicit ideas into concrete reality that affects people at massive scale. It's totally ok to let mathematicians, for example, go off and study just mathematics, because mathematicians are harmless. Programmers are dangerous. Without perspective, we will calculate ourselves right into dystopia - we're doing it right now! What good is it going to do any of us to write systems that strip away all our civil liberties with perfect big-O complexity?
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  How many programmers are making those decisions on their own and how many are doing what their PM told them do to, at the command of ever higher ups? It's a weird trend to blame all tech outcomes on programmers who often have the least amount of control over what the systems the build are intended to do.
odyssey7 4y ago
Computer Science is classified as a liberal arts degree at William & Mary: https://catalog.wm.edu/content.php?catoid=24&navoid=3884 https://catalog.wm.edu/content.php?catoid=24&navoid=3884.
- WalterGR 4y ago
  At UC Berkeley (#1 along with MIT, Stanfurd, CMU) Computer Science is a BA degree.
ankurdhama 4y ago
Ah, the ever green tradition of humans to define very fuzzy categories and then debating enlessly about what stuff belongs to what category.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  I don't think that's what the author is doing. I think the author is arguing that the skills taught in liberal art degrees are often skills that people who do computer science need but don't value. Becuase computer science degrees answer the question of "how to build" not "what to build" but the value is in "what to build".
  - forgotusername6 4y ago
    How to build is still valuable. Imagine if we had a world full of people who knew "what to build" but not how to build it.
    - scollet 4y ago
      We do have that though, right now.
  - anamax 4y ago
    The same can be said about chemical, civil, and mechanical engineering, yet ...
  - ThrowITout4321 4y ago
    Apple has capitalized on the liberal arts aspects of tech. They were able to figure out how to make computers useful and desirable to the every-man thanks to it. Without it, computers would have mostly been relegated to the work environment. I agree computer science needs to change. There needs to be a way to incorporate some of those aspects into a CS degree. If we want the full advantages of tech in our lives.
- paulcole 4y ago
  It’s not really much of a debate. If I like the thing then it definitely belongs in the category I like. If I don’t like the thing then it definitely belongs in the category I don’t like.
yowlingcat 4y ago
If the point of a CS education is to prepare people to work in software (and that assertion is debatable!) There's a lot of heavy lifting being done by that parenthetical. I don't think the point of a CS education is to prepare people to work in software. It's to teach them the theoretical groundings of computation and how to engage in abstract reasoning about it. It always felt a lot more similar to applied mathematics to me than anything else. I sense an is/ought conflation from the author. I could agree that software engineering as a profession could benefit from more practitioners with a liberal arts background. The thing is, I just don't know if that is necessary for more than a self selecting group. A liberal arts degree has more to do with going to a liberal arts institution with a common core curriculum that teaches one how to read, write, and interact critically with great books and history. I had such an undergraduate experience and I felt like a benefitted from it significantly. It's hard to get into a good liberal arts college, just like it's hard to get into an Ivy League institution. I don't think one can democratize the intrinsically elitist aspects of a holistic liberal arts education because the vast majority of people are simply not interested in it and will never be. The only way I could see that changing is with a vast fundamental overhaul of the K-12 education system that actually prepares citizens from childhood to adulthood for such an education; in which case I think it is then perfectly fine and reasonable to expect the entire adult populous to be prepared to get such an education. It seems like this is how it works in many European countries. But it's not how it works in the USA, where I live.
VLM 4y ago
This is downstream of publish-or-perish. My point is the people in charge of curriculum and education are all $200K+/yr tenured professors in the style of CS is Knuth and Knuth is CS and that's the end of the convo, so no great surprise that CS curricula are mostly weed-out classes mixed with mathematical theory classes, because the old generation will always tutor the new generation in its own image. You have to notice that everyone in the author's list of notables is very interesting but has ZERO soft power and none of them are tenured profs or administrative department heads at uni. My gut level guess of where this is all going by my grandkids generation is there are about 1000 framing carpenters for every 100 general contractors and about 1 structural engineer (your locale may vary, ours has weird snow load problems). So in my grandkids generation "front end" "UI" people will likely come from apprenticeships or 2-year community college at most, whereas you want a "back-end" guy who can do some architecture he's going to have a very technical 4-year, and every company will have maybe one programmer with a classic CS background who does architecture and algo optimization all day. When I was a young guy, everyone who graduated with a CS degree had to write a language using lex and yacc, maybe not much of a language but you had to get something to compile at minimum. Now I enjoyed that class immensely and it was one of my favorites and I've never used any of the skills since then, but that class is kinda dumb if 95%+ of jobs now will be front end javascript level work.
- dorchadas 4y ago
  > but that class is kinda dumb if 95%+ of jobs now will be front end javascript level work. I think this sentence sums it up more than relating it to publish-or-perish. It comes down to what is the purpose of university. Is it job training, as companies want it to be (because why should they train their employees when they can outsource it; this has led students to expect it to be job training too), or is it actually about learning the fundamentals of why things work, in preparation to go further on in said field. Or just about learning about 'humanity' in general (as universities were more in the past; humanities oriented). I think this is the root issue. To me, university should be (2) and (3), not (1). But companies want it to be (1), and students expect it to be (1), whereas professors want (2) and (3) depending on field, and that's where part of the problem lies.
dehrmann 4y ago
This is a bit like saying civil engineers designing freeway interchanges should know about induced demand.
deleted 4y ago
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wesapien 4y ago
So vegan Computer Science lmao Why do these type of people like to co-opt and not create something new? Then say something is wrong with these people if they don't like this new "vegan" version.
- deleted 4y ago
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jdthedisciple 4y ago
What would be the/a consequence of CS being labelled a liberal arts degree ... ? What would be the benefit ? There doesn't even seem to be an agreed upon definition of what liberal arts truly are in 2022 so this whole discussion seems quite pointless to me.
charles_f 4y ago
Two things 1) This is ass backwards. We don't need CS who know about accounting, hr, etc. Jobs of the future will be automated. Dev is an essential skill, the same way English or maths used to be. We need these professionals to learn how to code to "gain one level up", and make the computer do whatever devs are building for them now. 2) Market has needs for a lot of people who know how to program using high level frameworks. CS programs have evolved accordingly. 20y ago, it was a room full of geeks (with the original meaning), coding on freebsd. Program had electronics, assembler, C, you learned to build a compiler from scratch, a virtual machine, a shell, stdio, etc. There was a lot of tinkering with dark bsd flavors. Programs today are at a much higher level, learning how to use react, and frameworks built by others. To the point where I see devs who don't know what OSI means and don't even know how to reinstall windows themselves. I don't think it's bad, I think the need for CS has remained somewhat similar, what we need today is app developers which is very different. You don't need a tech genius to build an accounting app. You need someone who can understand these needs and transfer them into relatively straight forward code over all the abstraction levels built by these tech geniuses. So I think the claim that CS is a liberal art is preposterous. I think that what people call CS has evolved into two things, CS and App dev, the latter which should start moving to other professionals, and that people didn't realize it yet.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Pretty much any four-year college degree that could have a BS attached to it could equally well have a BA attached to it, depending on the course work required. Mathematics with a focus on the history of mathematics and the social / cultural aspects of mathematics, educational in mathematics, etc. would maybe be a BA. Generally, the difference will be something like BS degree students take twice as many calculus and differential equations courses as BA students do. As to whether one feels better about having a BA vs a BS, in reality most people don't care too much about things like that. A BA may leave more room for classes in other subjects, which can be beneficial. A BS might be better preparation for a grad program in that subject, otherwise your grad program might require a year of in-subject coursework.
tantalor 4y ago
Purely semantics. Boring
zephrx1111 4y ago
From the title only, I can deduce why US has to import so many programmers from China and India.
dieselgate 4y ago
Skimmed the article but it doesn’t have that much content? I’m a developer without a “traditional” CS background (my degree is in bio engineering) but the points mentioned in the article don’t strike me as novel. Isn’t this why STEM acronym has evolved to incorporate Art, and is now called STEAM? The post says “but liberal arts is about critical thinking, logic, picking apart complex problems, and ethics.” and I would say the same applies to a technical education.
MarcoZavala 4y ago

92 points by mbellotti 4y ago

Pentarivium?

ggm 4y ago

In Ireland, computer scientists who wrote programs were deemed writers and qualified for Irish arts tax treatment, in the 70s

ealexhudson 4y ago
Copyright, still today and across much of the world, is based on the concepts of authorship and publishing. It works in software in practically the same way as literature.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Ah yes the software developer jack of all trades now needs to add more skills to their bow. Or just hire people in the role of UX design as a specific profession

spacemanmatt 4y ago
My life as a full-stacker: When I have to install the database, write the schema, write the app, write the DR policy, and eventually also argue for another developer, I get context switching fatigue and become susceptible to external recruitment.

cjdrake 4y ago

No, it's not.

psyc 4y ago

Clickbait. Article says it should be. To which I say: the fuck it should. Is a law degree a liberal arts degree? If universities decide CS needs to include some instruction in the human side, they can offer those classes without reclassifying CS as some bullshit.

lthornberry 4y ago
In the US, law is a graduate degree. A significant majority of law school students already have a liberal arts degree. This is an entirely different case. On the other point, offering CS degrees as liberal arts degrees wouldn't meant "reclassifying CS as some bullshit" (or, indeed, reclassifying CS at all). There are many fields where some colleges already choose to offer the major as a B.A. while others offer it as a B.S. It's not a difference in the field, it's a difference in what requirements a college implements for getting a degree in the field. In other words, exactly what you suggested should happen.

dijit 4y ago

I think the author is conflating vocational education with university curriculum. It is often the case that universities offer courses that are much more theoretical than the practical application, even medical studies to some extent begin with very high level concepts and theories; the reason for this is because they’re attempting to optimise for better understanding of the underlying foundations of the discipline than for any particular job. Vocational qualifications are extremely handy, but they have a bit of a bad reputation these days. Code academies are not seen as prestigious, despite being the authors ideal. The game assembly (TGA) is one such vocational studies program in southern Sweden with an excellent reputation in the local community for churning out quality (junior) game devs that are ready to work, but suffers with backend programming sections still; since most people who do game dev do not enter to be in the backend. I would be extremely happy to return to apprenticeships, I would have killed for one going into this industry, but given that employers only care about getting new mid-levels or seniors and not investing in what they already have: it’s always going to be a losing battle as the invested talent atrophies and leaves to go to other places.

chmod600 4y ago
From the article: "If the point of a CS education is to prepare people to work in software (and that assertion is debatable!)" The author uses a premise, while acknowledging that the reader might not agree with the premise. That's not conflating anything. And the author's suggestions are far from "vocational"... they just move out of the limited field we call computer science.
savolai 4y ago
That’s not the point of view the author is advocating though. It’s not that they think CS is not practical enough. To me, what they’re saying is that CS has a point of view that is so narrow and constructed from such a limited perspective that it’s actually harmful to society as a whole. i.e. CS is removed from science as a whole, not by virtue of being too theoretical but as a result of being applied, but in a very skewed fashion. CS practitioners have a lot of power in society and ethical norms are lacking, so this has consequences.
fullshark 4y ago

mbaytas 4y ago

There is a branch of computer science, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), where exactly the ideas in this article have been playing out for a few decades already. Earlier this year I wrote about HCI as the intersection of technical craft and social sciences: https://www.designdisciplin.com/hci-profession/ https://www.designdisciplin.com/hci-profession/ Interestingly the responses I got from people in the HCI field was the inverse of the sentiment in this article. Here it seems that the author is arguing to increase social sciences in CS, and getting pushback. One of my arguments was to increase tech/eng competences in HCI, and I got pushback on that too.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Earlier this year I wrote about HCI as the intersection of technical craft and social sciences. Interestingly the responses I got from people in the HCI field was the inverse of the sentiment in this article (...) I got pushback on that too. Some things seem defined not just by intersection but by exclusion. I've experienced both sides. As a computer scientist working in arts and music, I find the "computer music" field builds on a strong affinity. Technology and arts form a natural positive bond, although one meets the occasional purist who only hand-carves their own medieval flutes. It's a fusion intersection to which one can never bring too much humanities nor science. I don't feel out of place discussing philosophy and matrix multiplication in the same breath. As I matured my interests post 2013 changed focus to digital rights and cybersecurity. It seems to me this area is currently defined by antagonism. It is a human-computer design field, yet is a chasm between human values and rigid thinking where people and systems clash. In computer music, what is at stake is mostly joy. In cybersecurity what is at stake is power. As in any struggle the technocrats just wanna "hit them harder with more". More cryptography. More lockdown. More central authority. The actual utility, or god forbid 'pleasure' of computing be damned. But there is another movement emerging in cybersecurity, to which I am affiliated. "Computing in the public interest", or "humanistic computing", whatever you want to call it, where technical concerns are fused on an equal basis with rights, freedoms and responsibilities. Existing dead centre of that exclusion means getting push-back from both sides. But, to be honest I take that as confirmation that the work is fresh, valid, and essential.

drewcoo 4y ago

So CS has some special need for academic cross-pollination that math and engineering don't share. If so, I'm shocked. Bellotti asserted this several times without anything to substantiate the claim. Kill It with Fire was on my reading list. I think I want to read more reviews now.

tonnydourado 4y ago
Have you heard of Facebook?

creakingstairs 4y ago

I think we should leave comp sci as what it is. > The bulk of software work today is about integrating computation into human driven tasks, predicting and anticipating how people think, what they need, how they react to new communication and work methods Sure. But that is not what comp sci is about. If one wants better programmers then those aspect should be put in a different, more job focused, degrees like Software Engineering. It’s should be a choice. If people want to focus on maths and computers, then let them focus on maths and computers without other fields. Degrees aren’t just about jobs.

fallingknife 4y ago
> Degrees aren’t just about jobs But degrees are used as a gatekeeper for jobs, and the price of a degree, 4 years of lost earnings + $200K, means that the only practical reason to get one, for the vast majority of people, is to get a higher paying job. So in reality, degrees are about jobs, and universities should start acting like it. I do share your sentiment that it shouldn't be this way, but if you tried to get rid of this system of degrees as job qualifications, the universities would be your main opponent. A degree not about getting a job would have to be more like 1 year & $20K to really get many takers, and that would be much less money and power for the university.
- creakingstairs 4y ago
  I agree with you mostly. But some random thoughts. > 4 years of lost earnings + $200K Yeah I forgot how much US universities cost. I did a double major in LLB and BA and my student loan at the end was less than 50k including some living costs. I can see why people in US are more focused on job qualification side of a degree if the opportunity cost was that much.
  - seoaeu 4y ago
    Yeah, anyone saying that you shouldn’t think about money when making perhaps the single largest expenditure in your life* probably doesn’t have your best interests in mind. * admittedly, a lot of people buy homes that cost more. Still probably in the top 5.

ukj 4y ago

Yes it is a liberal arts degree: no humans - no need for computation. Understanding ourselves and our needs is necessary for inventing; improving or sustaining any technology. Yes it is a STEM degree: no rigor - no computation. Understanding how the universe works is necessary in order to exploit matter and convince it to do computations for us. Everything humans do (STEM included) is for humans; and by humans. This bipartisan view of universities and faux-conflict isn’t useful.

eimrine 4y ago
> no humans - no need for computation. I would disagree with this statement. I have a pet AI program which can get some work done and gain some cryptocurrencies for that and pay for its hosting for keep doing that work. I am sure the AI will overlive all the humans and it really needs some computations for living.
- ukj 4y ago
  I disagree with your disagreement. Why do humans need/invent computation, hosting, cryptocurrencies and AI? I can’t fathom any data center remaining online for more than a few weeks/months if all humans keeping it running magically disappeared.
  - eimrine 4y ago
    > Why do humans need/invent computation, hosting, cryptocurrencies and AI? Because they use to have some spare time? > I can’t fathom any data center remaining online for more than a few weeks/months if all humans keeping it running magically disappeared. That few weeks my pet AI will be refusing your statement that no human means no need for computations.
    - ukj 4y ago
      Then step aside and take a vow of silence. Let me speak with your AI. Let it refute me by telling me about it’s needs. Queue excuses…
4y ago

athrowaway3z 4y ago

Not entirely related here, but fwiw historically most European CS split from the math department and in the US most were split off from the electrical engineering department. Every now and then you notice it in what people do and do not know.

bloodyplonker22 4y ago

ukj 4y ago
In the “woke” world of computation this sentence is false. And the previous sentence is true. The liar’s paradox, decidability and undecidability (being core ideas in computer science) directly imply that it is scientifically undecidable what a man; or a woman is. Those are (in fact) questions for the liberal arts department and broader society, and the answers are usually settled by social convention and democratic discourse. A computer scientist will likely understand why the above is true. The rest might be tempted to downvote this assault on their intuitions. Update: 3 people who don’t understand computer science disapprove of this comment (this is a running score)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ycombinete 4y ago
  Your comment is confusingly written. I have no idea what you’re talking about, or what sentences you are referring to. Also, you’ll collect a lot more downvotes now that you’re obnoxiously talking about your downvotes.
  - ukj 4y ago
    What is confusing you about my comment? People who understand computer science also understand exactly what I am talking about. Because I explicitly said what I am talking about: undecidability. It is scientifically undecidable what a man; or a woman is. That is a question for the liberal arts and broader society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem
    - seoaeu 4y ago
      Your comment is written like a logic puzzle rather than as prose that’s meant to make sense. Well, at least the start of it is, which can be enough to persuade someone to stop reading an move on

spacemanmatt 4y ago

Application development is a blended skill and computer science is not the only discipline involved. CS is a mathematical science, not a liberal arts topic. This author is way off base.

curt15 4y ago
Mathematics itself is half science and half art.
- samarama 4y ago
  Mathematics is the most science and least art form possible. Every other field of study has more artsiness than Mathematics. However, Mathematics also still has a lot of artsiness to it.
  - apocadam 4y ago
    Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician. [Upon hearing that one of his students had dropped out to study poetry] - David Hilbert
    - samarama 4y ago
      Do you have an example of an academic field of study that is less of an art and more structured than Mathematics?
  - eimrine 4y ago
    Totally disagree. Mathematics is not a science at all because there is no any possible experiments in the Math fields. And remember what David Hilbert has told about one of his students who decided to go into arts instead of keep learning Math with him. He told "he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician".
    - yesenadam 4y ago
      > there is no any possible experiments in the Math fields. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_mathematics Worth googling too, a wide range of things come up: https://www.google.com/search?q=experimental+mathematics https://www.google.com/search?q=experimental+mathematics

denton-scratch 4y ago

Social Science, Ergonomics and Psychology aren't liberal arts subjects. Mediaeval History, French Literature and (arguably) Architecture are examples of liberal arts. I think there's an argument to be made that computer scientists benefit from studying liberal arts; but I think the author fails to make that argument (let alone that CS is actually liberal arts, as per the subject).

blululu 4y ago
Recommending a book on Marketing Science at the end is what really annoyed me the most about this.
spacemanmatt 4y ago
I can comfortably get on board with your analysis that there is an argument to be made but this author fails to make it.
eimrine 4y ago
> Mediaeval History, French Literature and (arguably) Architecture are examples of liberal arts. Wait a minute, what of 7 liberal arts are History and Literature in? I can not see any place for that in both Trivium and Quadrivium.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  Trivium and Quadrivium aren't really liberal arts, at least not any more. Trivium was logic, grammar and rhetoric - the basics for understanding and making arguments; quadrivium was music, astronomy, geometry and arithmetic - the "proper" subjects that one might want to argue about. I'd be inclined to count astronomy, geometry and arithmetic as STEM subjects, rather than liberal arts. But I don't think trivium and quadrivium have been a thing since the Middle Ages, and I'm sure that's not what the author was referring to.

bjornsing 4y ago

This is the direction things have been going in Sweden over the last 15 years, but I think it’s a shame and a waste of human potential. Why would you need a university CS degree to do UX design and write some JavaScript? There should be other degrees for that to be honest. I’m hoping this trend will now reverse and “real” software engineers will reclaim their profession, despite now being in the “minority”. Personally I’ve started calling myself a “deep tech software engineering entrepreneur” to try and distance myself from this “majority” of overeducated JavaScript fiddlers.

triyambakam 4y ago
Vad...? I would have no idea what you intend by calling yourself that if I hadn't read your comment. What's the problem with having a computer science education and writing JS? There are ample situations to utilize CS in browser code.

blululu 4y ago

Yes, but not as the author describes it. The author has a very narrow and circumscribed view of liberal arts. Going back to the beginnings: The “liberal” in Liberal Arts comes from liberate. The arts that free the soul. In its original formulation it had the trivium (rhetoric, grammar, logic) and the quadrivium (geometry, astronomy, music, arithmetic). People like the author commonly associate the whole project with a narrow subset. Well rounded does not just mean we eliminated math from the ciriculum. It should be obvious to most people here that computer science is essential for this in the modern age.

mathteddybear 4y ago
Indeed computer science is not trivial.

somewhereoutth 4y ago

CS is not a science, certainly not mathematics, it is not about 'seeking the deeper beauty of our [for mathematics: any] reality'. CS is not engineering, not much actual science or working principles get applied for most of the work done. CS is design, but design of a 4D artifact, something that moves in time and space, not just 3D. To make things more tractable, we do this in discreet space, not continuous space, which brings its own qualities and issues (e.g. non-locality - there is no underlying strata based on nearness). Design is concerned also with the who and the why, rather than just the what and the how. Hence a broad education is helpful.

spacemanmatt 4y ago
Is there some way to explain to me, a college dropout, why mathematics is a natural science but computations is not?
- popcube 4y ago
  because math is too difficult to I can't understand what they usually do

t_mann 4y ago

CS is liberal arts because software is used by humans? By that standard pretty much any degree qualifies as liberal arts, including medicine, engineering, law,... Tbf, that kind of thinking actually goes back to the origins of medieval universities, so there is some case to be made (a lot of universities still award BAs for pretty much every subject). But I guess the true intention here is to lower the barrier in technical terms for claiming CS degrees and SE salaries.

ukj 4y ago
Not just software. All knowledge (computer science, mathematics, physics, biology, etc.) is used by humans. To what end? That is not a scientific question. To steal the sentiment from a meme. Scientist: what is philosophy good for? Philosopher: I don’t know. What is science good for? Scientist: Well science has broad application in… Philosopher: aaaand you are doing philosophy *drops mic*
- spacemanmatt 4y ago
  > aaaand you are doing philosophy drops mic That approach has been used for great justice in my recent work/life. When you can see that far ahead in the argument because you are correct, you just lead your conversation partner to make your point for you.

nxrabl 4y ago

A lot of folks here seem to have a real rose-tinted idea of what CS degrees are actually like. If you took CS more than 10, 15 years ago, you might remember it as a scrappy, fringey degree program, maybe splintered off from Electrical Engineering, a refuge for mathematically-minded nerds to find beauty in the cold algorithmic elegance of computation. That is not what it is anymore, not now that everyone knows you can make six figures right out of college with a CS degree on your CV. At the college I went to, CS is the second largest program, on track to be the largest in the next few years, and Intro to CS is the single most popular class on campus. They cannot hire professors fast enough. They're launching their own coding bootcamp just to keep up with demand. A lot of people are getting this education, and we need to look at what we're teaching them. And what's on the curriculum? Some good hard math, but also a fair bit of nonsense. Some people in this thread seem to think colleges have been taken over by javascript, and that may be true in some places, but I wish they'd taught us JS, because what they taught me was Java Swing, because a decade ago the ivory-tower tenured professor who wrote that course thought it would be useful for getting us a job and never touched it again. They could've replaced that course with underwater basketweaving and nothing of value would've been lost, let alone any of the excellent humanities topics the author mentions in her post. There is plenty of space in the curriculum to clear out enterprise-driven cruft from fifteen years ago and replace it with some of the useful things the author mentions, without touching any of the core mathematics we all love. In fact I would go a step further: Having a lot of people who are very good at programming but who don't know anything else is a bad thing for society. This is unique to programming as a discipline - programmers have historically unprecedented power to turn fuzzy, implicit ideas into concrete reality that affects people at massive scale. It's totally ok to let mathematicians, for example, go off and study just mathematics, because mathematicians are harmless. Programmers are dangerous. Without perspective, we will calculate ourselves right into dystopia - we're doing it right now! What good is it going to do any of us to write systems that strip away all our civil liberties with perfect big-O complexity?

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
How many programmers are making those decisions on their own and how many are doing what their PM told them do to, at the command of ever higher ups? It's a weird trend to blame all tech outcomes on programmers who often have the least amount of control over what the systems the build are intended to do.

odyssey7 4y ago

Computer Science is classified as a liberal arts degree at William & Mary: https://catalog.wm.edu/content.php?catoid=24&navoid=3884 https://catalog.wm.edu/content.php?catoid=24&navoid=3884.

WalterGR 4y ago
At UC Berkeley (#1 along with MIT, Stanfurd, CMU) Computer Science is a BA degree.

ankurdhama 4y ago

Ah, the ever green tradition of humans to define very fuzzy categories and then debating enlessly about what stuff belongs to what category.

SilverBirch 4y ago
I don't think that's what the author is doing. I think the author is arguing that the skills taught in liberal art degrees are often skills that people who do computer science need but don't value. Becuase computer science degrees answer the question of "how to build" not "what to build" but the value is in "what to build".
- forgotusername6 4y ago
  How to build is still valuable. Imagine if we had a world full of people who knew "what to build" but not how to build it.
  - scollet 4y ago
    We do have that though, right now.
- anamax 4y ago
  The same can be said about chemical, civil, and mechanical engineering, yet ...
- ThrowITout4321 4y ago
  Apple has capitalized on the liberal arts aspects of tech. They were able to figure out how to make computers useful and desirable to the every-man thanks to it. Without it, computers would have mostly been relegated to the work environment. I agree computer science needs to change. There needs to be a way to incorporate some of those aspects into a CS degree. If we want the full advantages of tech in our lives.
paulcole 4y ago
It’s not really much of a debate. If I like the thing then it definitely belongs in the category I like. If I don’t like the thing then it definitely belongs in the category I don’t like.

yowlingcat 4y ago

If the point of a CS education is to prepare people to work in software (and that assertion is debatable!) There's a lot of heavy lifting being done by that parenthetical. I don't think the point of a CS education is to prepare people to work in software. It's to teach them the theoretical groundings of computation and how to engage in abstract reasoning about it. It always felt a lot more similar to applied mathematics to me than anything else. I sense an is/ought conflation from the author. I could agree that software engineering as a profession could benefit from more practitioners with a liberal arts background. The thing is, I just don't know if that is necessary for more than a self selecting group. A liberal arts degree has more to do with going to a liberal arts institution with a common core curriculum that teaches one how to read, write, and interact critically with great books and history. I had such an undergraduate experience and I felt like a benefitted from it significantly. It's hard to get into a good liberal arts college, just like it's hard to get into an Ivy League institution. I don't think one can democratize the intrinsically elitist aspects of a holistic liberal arts education because the vast majority of people are simply not interested in it and will never be. The only way I could see that changing is with a vast fundamental overhaul of the K-12 education system that actually prepares citizens from childhood to adulthood for such an education; in which case I think it is then perfectly fine and reasonable to expect the entire adult populous to be prepared to get such an education. It seems like this is how it works in many European countries. But it's not how it works in the USA, where I live.

VLM 4y ago

This is downstream of publish-or-perish. My point is the people in charge of curriculum and education are all $200K+/yr tenured professors in the style of CS is Knuth and Knuth is CS and that's the end of the convo, so no great surprise that CS curricula are mostly weed-out classes mixed with mathematical theory classes, because the old generation will always tutor the new generation in its own image. You have to notice that everyone in the author's list of notables is very interesting but has ZERO soft power and none of them are tenured profs or administrative department heads at uni. My gut level guess of where this is all going by my grandkids generation is there are about 1000 framing carpenters for every 100 general contractors and about 1 structural engineer (your locale may vary, ours has weird snow load problems). So in my grandkids generation "front end" "UI" people will likely come from apprenticeships or 2-year community college at most, whereas you want a "back-end" guy who can do some architecture he's going to have a very technical 4-year, and every company will have maybe one programmer with a classic CS background who does architecture and algo optimization all day. When I was a young guy, everyone who graduated with a CS degree had to write a language using lex and yacc, maybe not much of a language but you had to get something to compile at minimum. Now I enjoyed that class immensely and it was one of my favorites and I've never used any of the skills since then, but that class is kinda dumb if 95%+ of jobs now will be front end javascript level work.

dorchadas 4y ago
> but that class is kinda dumb if 95%+ of jobs now will be front end javascript level work. I think this sentence sums it up more than relating it to publish-or-perish. It comes down to what is the purpose of university. Is it job training, as companies want it to be (because why should they train their employees when they can outsource it; this has led students to expect it to be job training too), or is it actually about learning the fundamentals of why things work, in preparation to go further on in said field. Or just about learning about 'humanity' in general (as universities were more in the past; humanities oriented). I think this is the root issue. To me, university should be (2) and (3), not (1). But companies want it to be (1), and students expect it to be (1), whereas professors want (2) and (3) depending on field, and that's where part of the problem lies.

dehrmann 4y ago

This is a bit like saying civil engineers designing freeway interchanges should know about induced demand.

deleted 4y ago

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wesapien 4y ago

So vegan Computer Science lmao Why do these type of people like to co-opt and not create something new? Then say something is wrong with these people if they don't like this new "vegan" version.

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jdthedisciple 4y ago

What would be the/a consequence of CS being labelled a liberal arts degree ... ? What would be the benefit ? There doesn't even seem to be an agreed upon definition of what liberal arts truly are in 2022 so this whole discussion seems quite pointless to me.

charles_f 4y ago

Two things 1) This is ass backwards. We don't need CS who know about accounting, hr, etc. Jobs of the future will be automated. Dev is an essential skill, the same way English or maths used to be. We need these professionals to learn how to code to "gain one level up", and make the computer do whatever devs are building for them now. 2) Market has needs for a lot of people who know how to program using high level frameworks. CS programs have evolved accordingly. 20y ago, it was a room full of geeks (with the original meaning), coding on freebsd. Program had electronics, assembler, C, you learned to build a compiler from scratch, a virtual machine, a shell, stdio, etc. There was a lot of tinkering with dark bsd flavors. Programs today are at a much higher level, learning how to use react, and frameworks built by others. To the point where I see devs who don't know what OSI means and don't even know how to reinstall windows themselves. I don't think it's bad, I think the need for CS has remained somewhat similar, what we need today is app developers which is very different. You don't need a tech genius to build an accounting app. You need someone who can understand these needs and transfer them into relatively straight forward code over all the abstraction levels built by these tech geniuses. So I think the claim that CS is a liberal art is preposterous. I think that what people call CS has evolved into two things, CS and App dev, the latter which should start moving to other professionals, and that people didn't realize it yet.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Pretty much any four-year college degree that could have a BS attached to it could equally well have a BA attached to it, depending on the course work required. Mathematics with a focus on the history of mathematics and the social / cultural aspects of mathematics, educational in mathematics, etc. would maybe be a BA. Generally, the difference will be something like BS degree students take twice as many calculus and differential equations courses as BA students do. As to whether one feels better about having a BA vs a BS, in reality most people don't care too much about things like that. A BA may leave more room for classes in other subjects, which can be beneficial. A BS might be better preparation for a grad program in that subject, otherwise your grad program might require a year of in-subject coursework.

tantalor 4y ago

Purely semantics. Boring

zephrx1111 4y ago

From the title only, I can deduce why US has to import so many programmers from China and India.

dieselgate 4y ago

Skimmed the article but it doesn’t have that much content? I’m a developer without a “traditional” CS background (my degree is in bio engineering) but the points mentioned in the article don’t strike me as novel. Isn’t this why STEM acronym has evolved to incorporate Art, and is now called STEAM? The post says “but liberal arts is about critical thinking, logic, picking apart complex problems, and ethics.” and I would say the same applies to a technical education.

MarcoZavala 4y ago