SE is to CS as ME is to Physics

The past week I have had thoughts rolling around spurred by this post by Andrew Parker. The general theme of which is "how little a computer science education matches up to the real-world building of large scale applications." I thought it brought up a really good issue.

For me the issue comes down to whether you see a CS program as vocational in nature. Back when I graduated (in '95) I thought then that the CS program at my school (WPI) was too vocational in nature.

At WPI you do a major project your senior year as part of your graduation requirement. I've always leaned to the theoretical and mathematical side, and for my Physics degree my project was in the area of Quantum Mechanical energy degeneracies in multiple dimensions. No, I don't remember the equations in detail. But it landed me a published paper in the American Journal of Physics, so that was cool.

When it came time to do the major project for my CS degree I was the only one in my class not to work on some type of coding project. Instead my project was "Complexity Analysis of the Primitive Recursive Functions." I got all the coding experience I would need being in a Coop program and then staying on to work part-time after that, writing embedded firmware code in Assembly and C and Unix (SVR4) drivers and application code in C. And I think that's the right mix.

(And yeah, I know, with degrees in those two fields you'd think I would've leaned to Quantum Computation or something, but I'm not *that* theoretically minded :-)

It seems to me the argument is around the "S" in CS being "Science". There's a real difference between "Technology" and "Science" that we should recognize.

This is obvious when you look at Physics (which I majored in) and Mechanical Engineering (which I also majored in briefly before switching that one to CS). In ME there is more a lean to technology. No technology in Physics, other than around the instruments for running experiments.

I'd argue that we need just the same type of split (with cross-over training of course) that exists in Physics and ME in the field of computation.

I think there's already been one split that's happened that makes sense, which is in the field of Electrical Engineering with a focus on computers and lower-level programming - I think I've seen this referred to as ECE.

If we then split off "Software Engineering" as a full-fledged major, that feels like: SE is to CS as ME is to Physics.

Let's be honest, there'd be a *ton* more SE than CS majors, but who cares? At WPI when I was there we probably had at least a 10:1 ratio of ME to Physics graduates. Just like ME majors have to start with some Physics courses, SE majors would have to fulfill the basic CS courses.

The upside is that the SE majors would have a clear focus and would probably come out with much stronger industry skills that would enable them to start building things right away. Again, pretty close to the analogy to ME and Physics.

I'm sure there must be places where this split of SE off of CS is already happening. If that is the case, it should just be happening even faster :-).

I was also motivated to write this by a couple mathematically-oriented CS stories that came out in the past week. The first being around the attempted P!=NP proof, which brought back memories to my complexity theory studies. For the latest on that, this blog is following it.

The other story that caught my eye was around a proof put forward that any position of the Rubik's Cube can be solved in 20 moves or less (http://www.cube20.org/).

They served as reminders to me that a CS education is much more than learning about pointers, or whether you can create anonymous classes in Java easily, or how to work with a source control system, or how to provision and manage a Hadoop cluster.

Honestly, compared to when I graduated (it wasn't *that* long ago was it?) all of that can be learned and played with online. With guides, and open source projects looking for you to contribute. And, as a friend reminded me today, things like Google's Summer of Code to really go head down into implementation.

I'm sure there's never been a better time to learn about and become a great software developer. And really I think there's more and more proof that on the "technology" side (as opposed to "science" side) it doesn't even take going to school anymore.