I see there's still an audience for this apologist bullshit. In the
cake of life, the women are literally the eggs and butter, and the men
are the chocolate sprinkles. Yeah we're mostly useless (as the
one-father-many-mothers ratio attests), which is why men evolved for
greater variance. We are in other words the "spice of life."
Its just Silo Wars. I guess Wall Street Journal thinks using that as a title could come off as too click-baity.
Essentially, where do you house the CS department ? Inside the College of Arts & Science ? Inside the School of Engineering ? Or a separate autonomous School of Computing ?
This is how it plays out in reality - when I was a CS grad student, the department was part of A&S. Since Math is also Arts & Sciences, they had a huge influence. You could take Math courses instead of CS & get a degree in CS! So I did exactly that - took a graduate course in Graph Theory, PDE & Numerical Analysis from the Math department, & got out with a CS degree. Then I went to work for Sun Microsystems, where colleagues were surprised that I didn't know the difference between a raw socket & a tcp socket - shouldn't that be taught in school ? Well, I had skipped Computer Networking, Computer Graphics & Compiler Theory entirely by taking my 3 math courses. So that's what happens if you stick it into A&S - the Math faculty has too much influence.
3 years later, the CS department, now funded by NASA & the FBI, decided to move from A&S to School of Engineering. My advisor quit over that decision because he believed CS is part of Math. But then, other people joined & now Robotics, IoT etc gets taught - because engineering.
What's happening recently ( you can tell I live in a college town :) is that CS has gotten so big, its essentially eating up all the departments. So PhD students in EE, Math , Mech, Chem etc take 3 CS courses in the last semester - because, who wants to be an engineer/mathematician/etc when you can work at Google ? So those departments are like - get CS out of this place, let them have their own school so they don't pollute our students. I have several faculty kids who took this route - got the funding from EE, Mech etc but ended up working for Google after. So there's some justified backlash.
It's the classic liberal arts argument, applied to CS.
> None of the deans I spoke with aspires to launch, say, a department of art within their college of computing, or one of politics, sociology, or film. Their vision does not reflect the idea that computing can or should be a superordinate realm of scholarship, on the order of the arts or engineering. Rather, they are proceeding as though it were a technical school for producing a certain variety of very well-paid professionals. A computing college deserving of the name wouldn’t just provide deeper coursework in CS and its closely adjacent fields; it would expand and reinvent other, seemingly remote disciplines for the age of computation.
> [...] CS departments have been asked to train more software engineers without considering whether more software engineers are really what the world needs. Now I worry that they have a bigger problem to address: how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers.
And what keeps the money coming in? Thousands of man-hours of sales, legal,
tax, operations, and finance. Like someone earlier said, code is the
easy part.
I hate the old timers who always cite GNU's cover-my-costs tape
distribution, as if subsistence manifests a profit motive. The FSF
hawks merch, yes, but it was never about making money so much as
spreading a wrong-headed gospel.
I hate people who orthogonalize monetization and open-source. Getting
customers to cough up cash has always about knowing something they don't,
a leverage you give up by releasing source code.
