Computer Science is a Liberal Arts Degree
Thinking about programming as just math and engineering robs programmers of critical skills they need to build effective technology
For the last three years the emphasis in my career has been safety. I was first exposed to the community of safety researchers and practitioners at Strange Loop in 2017 and now I’m coming a bit full circle by doing a full 2-hour workshop on safety for Strange Loop 2022!
One of the important take aways I have from deep diving into this field is that there’s a lot of research that was done outside computer science that addresses challenges current software engineers struggle with, some of it done decades before these problems appeared in software. I’ve started to feel like I’m watching a bad disaster movie where very smart people make reasonable but dangerous decisions without understanding that. I keep thinking “…wait, don’t you know what Rasmussen said about this?” But of course …. how would they know? How would they even know to look for such research?
The traditional concept of a computer science degree focuses on computation, because when CS started as a field the people who programmed computers were also the people who built them, or designed their operating systems or contributed to compilers. All work where a thorough understanding of math and engineering are essential.