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Comment by RandomOpinion | Hacker News Reader

It's rather simple: A proper CS education, one that has all that "useless" theory that a number of HNers love to deride, equips its bearer to understand how anything in the software world is implemented. You don't have to study as hard to pick up a new technology or stack because you will know roughly what the underlying implementation has to look like and can simply poke around to identify the components and interfaces that you know have to be there.

Or, as a recent blog posting that made HN succinctly put it "'How' ages faster than 'Why'" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13500883). Knowing the "why" of CS means you never have to chase the "how" of the latest flavor of the month stack or framework.

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This seems a bit like saying a physicist is more capable of understanding how satellites work than an engineer who designs satellites because he knows the underlying theory better. It's kind of true in some sense but doesn't really capture the context or nuance that goes into a non-trivial engineering effort, or the more general case asserted by the topic author.

That's not a very good analogy. Most would agree, I think, that the separation between CS, as taught in most programs, and professional software development is far, far smaller than the separation between physics and aerospace engineering.

Well, that's another discussion altogether. I'm of the view that the closeness of professional software development to academic CS is one of the biggest problems in the industry from the perspective of regarding it as an engineering discipline.

Agreed.. software engineering, as usually practiced, is definitely a craft. It's a very technical craft, but still a craft discipline.

I think that's just a function of how much money is in the field - more people end up in industry than academia AND industry has an even bigger interest in pushing the boundaries. This leads to blurring between the lines of industry and academia.

I'm sure if there were more money in subatomic physics we'd observe the same thing.

Not really. More like: if the way you make satellites dramatically changes on a continuing basis, then some solid knowledge in physics might prepare you better to adapt to the changing times than being trained in the current methodology.

yeah … it's about the high-order bit, thinking at a higher level of abstraction … learning a language vs. learning why the language is that way, how to design a language.

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