Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
I expect it's as useless as the rest of VCE matric. Probably it involves learning to use winword and whatever dreamweaver is called these days.
It probably is now, yes. Back then, I think the students at least learned a little about logic gates and a little about programming. I would be surprised if they were taught sorting algorithms, data structures, etc.
As to whether computer science is science strictly so-called, I think it's a similar question to whether mathematics is.
I am very clear (i.e. a bigot) on this: science *is* the empirical method. Therefore soft sciences (like psychology and anthropology) that do studies instead of experiments are not Real Science.[*]
This raises the question of whether applying statistical inference to behavioural "experiments" qualifies to make psychology scientific. Its practitioners claim that their methods are sufficiently rigorous (e.g., psychometric techniques) to make their empirical investigations scientifically sound by comparison with, say, biology or the physical sciences.
Likewise *real* (i.e. pure, not applied) mathematics is not science because it doesn't involve experimentation. It doesn't need to, because it exists in the realm of pure thought. It is, as it were, a /field isolate/ because other disciplines do not have this property. (Well, perhaps wishy-washy stuff like philosophy, ethics, law, theology, linguistics ... OK, I take back the "field isolate" remark.)
I agree. I think the reasons why mathematics is formally counted among the sciences are more a reflection of its applications than of the essential character of the subject.
Whenever someone tells me "I want to study CS at uni" I tell them adamantly that they should take a pure math or physics degree, *not* anything labelled "computer science", because in my experience the latter is a pointless waste of time. They might have to use matlab, but they won't have to put up with memorizing Java APIs. And their fellow students tend to be the ones that are doing interesting CS -- in their spare time. Various IRC denizens have corroborated that this is an international phenomenon.
Pure mathematics is one subject that has long been on my list of desirable areas of study. As a philosophy graduate, at least I know what a formal proof looks like and how to evaluate argumentation - background which is of much more lasting value than the Java APIs.