<p>annasdad, LOL! Here, have some kettle corn. :)</p>
<p>I’ve been hearing the term “algorithm” come out of the mouths of computer people for at least three decades. Maybe it’s a regional thing, like soda/pop/coke or hero/hoagie/sub/grinder.</p>
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That might be true for those who actually go to their doctors and don’t self-diagnose.</p>
<p>I’m very math-y but I’m not at all science-y, and the one computer science course I took back-in-the-day (learning BASIC, Fortran, Pascal, whatever the heck those things are) was useless and I wound up dropping it. While there may be overlap, I surely am not part of that overlap.</p>
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<p>Yes. Relatively new. Depending, that is, on your definition of “relatively.”</p>
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<p>[History</a> of Algorithms and Algorithmics](<a href=“http://www.scriptol.com/programming/algorithm-history.php]History”>History of Algorithms and Algorithmics)</p>
<p>Then there’s Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1, Fundamental Algorithms, published in 1968.</p>
<p>But I suppose you’ve never heard of Donald Knuth, either.</p>
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<p>What was that about credibility?</p>
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<p>S1 used to teach his HS computer team from The Art of Computer Programming, among others. Donald Knuth rocks. When S was in junior high and HS, his bday and Hanukkah gifts every year were books on this stuff. Not programming language manuals, but the theory, written by the big lights in the field.</p>
<p>S is largely a theory guy (and because theoretical CS can live in a math department or CS, this factored into the attention he paid to math programs). Is actually going to get to do a good bit of functional/theory stuff at his job.</p>
<p>S learned the importance of algorithms in 7th grade; he won a big science fair award for a project he wrote, then realized six months later (after spending the summer reading Knuth and others) that Djikstra’s algorithm would have elegantly solved his problem in a LOT less time than the three weeks and three computers it took to run his simulation. Lesson learned, though: his programming became much more elegant and he really started honing in on the patterns and efficient ways to move/manipulate data. Was probably the most important thing he learned in the field.</p>
<p>I have V1 at home in my library - the language used in that book is MIX - not exactly a modern high-level language.</p>
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<p>Seeing as Knuth started writing it in 1962, I doubt whether too many of what would today be considered “modern high-level languages” were around - depending on whether FORTRAN and COBOL would meet your definition.</p>
<p>So what’s your point Annasdad? First you IMPLY only a moron wouldn’t know who so and so is - then when someone stupidly responds to your baiting - intended only to humiliate and degrade others - you and BC poo poo that knowledge.</p>
<p>My point, since you asked, is that someone who makes a statement like:</p>
<p>“there is no math or science in CS. None.”</p>
<p>and then backs up that statement with a claim to have a degree in CS needs to have her credibility tested.</p>
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<p>No: quite a lot of non-morons have never heard of Donald Knuth. If I had to guess, I would say that the huge majority of intelligent and educated non-morons outside the set of computer scientists have heard of Donald Knuth. But I doubt that many people within that set, moronic and otherwise, have never heard of Donald Knuth. And the poster whose claimed expertise I was questioning has claimed to be within that set, yet also said she had never heard the word that forms the title of the first volume of Knuth’s seminal work.</p>
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<p>Nope - intended to shed light on the claimed expertise of one specific poster.</p>
<p>When I got out, Knuth was only up to book 3 - searching, sorting & merging, if I’m not mistaken. I think there were some 7 or so books planned in the series - did they materialize? I also recall the language he wrote the algorithms in his books then included statements that became very politically incorrect subsequently, and I’m curious whether his later books or newer editions of the three books I was familiar with used a different language.</p>
<p>Back to the original discussion, while a significant number of us 70s programmers actually wrote code to the level of heap sorts, B-Trees, and the other hash, thereby requiring classic comp sci knowledge, I seriously question if very many people ever have to know anything about these now. Knowledge closer to the end user operation - how’s the casemix index changing in the last quarter and the tools to monitor such - is much more of the norm for the overwhelming majority of those that I deal with in the industry these days.</p>
<p>^^^If you doubt another poster’s veracity, you can bring it to their attention in a non-confrontational manner. You would do that by just saying so, and not quizzing them to make them prove something. You also negated what another poster said (maybe not intentionally) by your method.</p>
<p>Also, I think when somebody is a poster for whom English is obviously not their primary language you take into consideration that what they are saying may not be what they are intending to say (because of lack of familiarity with the language), so you cut them some slack.</p>
<p>I only read the first 4 pages of this thread but I’d like to go back to the title of the thread for a second. We are trying to answer “why are there so few computer science majors?” without ever establishing that the number of computer science majors is actually surprisingly low. I would like to pose a question to the general audience: how many computer science majors would you consider adequate? </p>
<p>The [Scientific</a> American](<a href=“U.S. Science Degrees Are Up - Scientific American”>U.S. Science Degrees Are Up - Scientific American) reports that there were more than 38,000 Bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer science in 2009. For comparison, 13,000 civil engineers, 18,000 mechanical engineers, 5,000 physicists and 16,000 mathematicians graduated in the same year. And CS is unlike most other STEM fields in that a Bachelor’s degree is not even necessary for an entry-level job; community colleges offer a fine foundation. In 2009 also, community colleges awarded 30,000 [Associate’s</a> degrees](<a href=“http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s2.htm#s2]Associate’s”>http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s2.htm#s2) in computer science and probably many more shorter and specialized certificates that are not counted in national statistics.</p>
<p>Given that the number of computer science majors exceeds the number of any other STEM major except biology (with many pre-meds), are we justified in calling the number of CS majors “low”? I apologize if this has already been discussed elsewhere in this thread.</p>
<p>MIX is the world’s first polyunsaturated computer. Like most machines, it has an identifying number - the 1009. This number was found by taking 16 actual computers which are very similar to MIX and on which MIX can be easily simulated, then averaging their numbers with equal weight:</p>
<p>It’s basically machine code.</p>
<p>I have the second edition, from 1973. On the front cover I have my name, address and high-school information so I bought this when I was in high-school which would have been around 1977. The price imprint ($20.25 which was quite a bit for a textbook back then) looks like it came from the Tech Coop (I bought textbooks from the Harvard and Tech Coops back then).</p>
<p>I’d consider COBOL, PASCAL and BASIC higher-level languages and they were by the time of the first edition. Fortran - I’ve always been on the fence with this one - it would probably be considered a 3GL but my guess is that writing a compiler for it would be relatively easier compared to other richer languages.</p>
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<p>Her statement was about CS and then she said that she has a degree in it. I looked at that statement and think that she meant IT instead of it referring back to CS. That would make the most sense in the context of her other statements.</p>
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<p>I improved the hash code for Mozilla a few years ago so yes, that sort of thing is important. Son has some work to do in performance optimization for very large data sets which compares billions of things to billions of things - the software they use uses hashes to compute set arithmetic. He does need to understand what’s going on even if he doesn’t know the details.</p>
<p>There was one very hard question that he had on an interview and it dealt with searching. He failed the question but I knew the answer immediately. I asked some folks at work and some knew it and some didn’t.</p>
<p>I have two degrees in CS (1970s B.Sc. and 1990s M.Sc.) and have worked as a software engineer for going on four decades. We even used punch cards when I was an undergrad. I haven’t bothered to keep up with this thread consistently. A lot of it strikes me as beyond silly. But I’ll chime in to say that I line up with the algorithms and Knuth party.</p>
<p>On the original question, I’m not convinced that the US is creating too few CS graduates when employers like mine continue to move software development jobs to lower-wage foreign acquisitions or outsourcers.</p>
<p>Back to the old days when people used the punch card, the first thing most people do to write a program was to draw a flow chart. That flow chart was called algorithm. The flow chart looks like the one in here:</p>
<p>[Algorithm</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm]Algorithm”>Algorithm - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>One of the old computer languages in the 50s was called ALGO. This word was from the word algorithm.</p>
<p>[ALGO</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGO]ALGO”>ALGO - Wikipedia)</p>
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<p>We had those green or white translucent flow chart templates too.</p>
<p>Almost all old introductory computer science textbooks have at least one flow chart. And flow charts appeared everywhere in computer programming manuals.</p>