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user-inactivated  ·  3019 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The science myths that will not die.

    Why do you expect students who are essentially going through a math program to be able to do that?

Yeah, I've read Dijkstra too. He was brilliant and his aloofness was admirable but he still wrote programs. The great thing about computing is that the machine is the best teacher anyone could ask for. Sure, everything we do is applied logic and combinatorics, but we can render our objects of study concrete and poke at them, we can see where our understanding is flawed because the machine throws it in our faces. That is what is distinct about computing, that we get to work halfway between the ideal and the real. If you don't want to do that then you're better off studying logic in the philosophy department or combinatorics in the math department.