Is Computer Science Dead?

Posted by kdawson on Monday March 12, 2007 @08:51PM from the pining-for-the-fjords dept.

warm sushi writes "An academic at the British Computing Society asks, Is computer science dead? Citing falling student enrollments and improved technology, British academic Neil McBride claims that off-the-shelf solutions are removing much of the demand for high-level development skills: 'As commercial software products have matured, it no longer makes sense for organizations to develop software from scratch. Accounting packages, enterprise resource packages, customer relationship management systems are the order of the day: stable, well-proven and easily available.' Is that quote laughable? Or has the software development industry stabilized to an off-the-self commodity?"

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Re:Wow! by Anonymous Coward · 2007-03-12 23:33 · Score: -1, Redundant

> Software don't write itself.
I beg to differ. One of the aims of computer science and AI is formal (ie. automated) verification of code. If computer science achieves this goal software that writes software may well come true. Perhaps, for example, by combining formal verification with some sort of genetic system and let the verification perform natural selection?

The problem is that most people confuse computer science with programming. Computer Science would exist even if we didn't have computers, as it is about the theory of computation and you don't need a computer to do theory.