Monday, June 11, 2012

A definition of computer science

So after some thought about what I actually do as a computer scientist I've come up with a definition for the field that actually makes sense.

Computer science is the art of using several languages to write books that you then give to machines to tell them how to make something out of collections of content.

Sometimes you write the languages used to write the books. Other times you write about ways to write things that can be used in the books (this thing is faster or more accurate than that thing, and that thing allows us to do this new thing). Often times, these books have been written by other people and you reference them to create a new book.

Content are things created either by machines themselves, or other people. Content can include things like information about who has visited a website, the recorded wind speeds of a region of the Earth, or a picture that paints the body of a character in a 3D video game.

The essence of the definition is that what we do is write many pages of text in order to create some specific system/collection of happenings in machines.

Even if you spend much of your time using nothing but whiteboards and markers to prove equations and ideas (which is great and vital to do), at some point one would hope that you actually implement those things inside of a machine to give the theory a form that can be used.

Lol finally I can explain what I do to people who dont do what I do. I think it's intuitive also as it reminds me of writing English and History papers in high school.

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