What is CS about?

I agree with Abigail, CS is not about computers. CS is about how we work together to organize ideas and concepts to be able to specify the operation of something incredibly complex. It is not about the incidental details of what is actually going to happen. It is about the principles and details that humans need to understand to get it to happen.

And so from the point of view of the programmer it is fundamentally irrelevant whether the underlying computation is being carried out by a Turing machine, a RISC processor, an x86 chip, or a Lisp machine. For a human to get things to happen it is essential that the human stop thinking at a low level and start creating useful abstractions. And understanding and manipulating those abstractions means forgetting about the operations that are being performed and thinking about the process of humans trying to comprehend and direct the process.

You don't believe me? Well what is Dijkstra best known for? Go To Considered Harmful. Read it. It is a famous paper. When the ACM decided to put some famous papers that had appeared in their magazines online, it was the second one they chose. It started a famous debate, and even people who have not read and understood the paper know that goto is something you are supposed to avoid.

You haven't read it yet? Please do. Or else what I am about to say will make no sense.

OK, you just read one of the most influential papers ever written in CS. And not just influential in the abstract. It completely revolutionized the practice of programming. If there is an essence to the study of CS, that paper of all papers should reflect it.

What did it have to do with computers?

In reply to I *definitely* agree with Dijkstra by tilly
in thread about Coolness, Impatience and Complexity by Blop

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