news.ycombinator.com• May 4, 2022• 1 min read
On the Essence of Computer ScienceOn the essence of computer science"I'd like to welcome you to this course on computer science. Actually, that's a terrible way to start. Computer science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, it's not a science. It might be engineering or it might be art, but we'll actually see that computer so-called science actually has a lot in common with magic, and we'll see that in this course.So it's not a science. It's also not really very much about computers. And it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not really about microscopes and petri dishes. And it's not about computers in the same sense that geometry is not really about using surveying instruments.In fact, there's a lot of commonality between computer science and geometry. Geometry, first of all, is another subject with a lousy name. The name comes from Gaia, meaning the Earth, and metron, meaning to measure. Geometry originally meant measuring the
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