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aleph_minus_one • today at 12:46 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

I think this article is highly unfair to computer scientists:

- Computer science is about extending our understanding what can be done with computers (including what can be done efficiently). The computer scientist in this story exactly does that: he sees that the usage of the poster is a special case of a much more general pattern, and tries to understand this pattern, so that a solution that is developed for the general case can be applied to all of them, without having to develop a novel solution for every new case, which can save an insane amount of money.

- The kind of requirement analysis, and process orientation is rather untypical for computer scientists, but rather for what is called in German "Wirtschaftsinformatiker" (i.e. people who are business process analysts first and programmers second). These are people who are deep in love with such analysis paralysis, not the typical programmer or computer scientist who is often quite suspicious of such concepts.

In other words: if your toilet is clogged, you call a plumber, and not an expert in fluid dynamics.


Replies

the_af • today at 12:57 PM

The joke also conflates computer scientists with an architecture astronaut / software engineer (whatever that means, let's say a practitioner who works writing software for a living), which alas! is all too common.