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College Students Are Flocking To Computer Science Majors (ieeeusa.org)
Slashdot reader dcblogs writes:
Enrollments in Computer Science are on a hockey stick trajectory and show no signs of slowing down. Stanford University declared computer science enrollments, for instance, went from 87 in the 2007-08 academic year to 353 in the recently completed year. It's similar at other schools. Boston University, for instance, had 110 declared undergraduate computer science majors in 2009. This fall it will have more than 550. Professor Mehran Sahami, who is the associate chair for education in the CS department at Stanford, believes the enrollment trend will continue. "As the numbers bear out, the interest in computer science has grown tremendously and shows no signs of crashing." But after the 2000 dot-com bust computer science enrollments fell dramatically and students soured on the degree. Could something like it happen again?
Mark Crovella, the chair of Boston University's CS department, notes that "the overall interest in computer science at B.U. is currently at about twice the level it was at the peak of the dot.com year." But the article points out that salaries for new grads are still rising, "which suggests that demand is real." And Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business Administration, adds "I'm more worried about the job outlook for people without these skills."
Mark Crovella, the chair of Boston University's CS department, notes that "the overall interest in computer science at B.U. is currently at about twice the level it was at the peak of the dot.com year." But the article points out that salaries for new grads are still rising, "which suggests that demand is real." And Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business Administration, adds "I'm more worried about the job outlook for people without these skills."
Stop taking computer science and go back to business you lames
The idea that having a CS degree makes you a competent programmer is laughable... Those "deep" algorithmic problem solving abilities are what pay so much, and more important, and interest in them. My value to my employer has little do with any degree and mostly due to the fact when I was given a problem, I could identify why the current solutions had failed because I knew how computers work.
The majority of CS majors I know can't even tell you how a processor works on basic principles. It's just a black box to them, and when things fail like a stack overflow, they don't know what that even means.
It's a shame that all of the jobs are being taken by Indian visa holders.
The last several companies I've worked for didn't have any American citizens below the age of 35-40 working in IT. Every last one of them was a "temp" H1B worker from India.
Fortunately, I specialize in technologies that aren't being taught in the cookie-cutter "universities" in India, so I can still find work. But I would never recommend that an American citizen get in to software development as a career. Not unless they want to compete on salary with a million people who have a 3rd-world standard of living.
While the growth of CS grads will mean a lot in the long term. With more people making new products creating more jobs.... in the short term there will be an influx of kids that we will need to deprogram the strict rules that were taught during the education.
There is a difference between accedemic theory and real life.
A lot of showing them when to break the rules and seporate yourself from the religion of OOP. And then when they should embrace the concept of OOP in a non OOP environment.
Then there is teaching them to work in a team and put their egos aside and do it the way that is said to do it, even if it seems less efficient at first.
Then I will need to go over all my arguments again.
Them: Why do it that way?
Me: I need to keep the code open for new features.
Them: What features?
Me: I don't know yet, but they are going to ask for something, and if you keep this section flexible it will prevent us from rewriting everything.
Them: You are just an old mad who doesn't want to use new technology.
Then they will do it there way.
3 months later...
Them we need to rewrite the code because of this stupid request that wasn't part of the original project spec.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This semester we're going to party like it's 1999 . . .
50% will be unhappy and drop out to a business degree.
My nephew hated it so much that he dropped out after 3 yrs in CS and joined the Navy.
Hopefully, students will find what gets them excited and leads to a happy life.
Programming isn't for everyone. I've only met a few CS grads who actually end up programming.
YES
Table-ized A.I.
Two data points at the beginning and end is not enough to declare a hockey-stick trajectory. You need at least three points to establish curvature.
Right now this is attractive because it gives you a potential path to work at big names like Google and facebook.
But which courses are these kids not enrolling in to do CS instead?
Is medicine dropping? or law? or biology? or physics? or arts? or ...?
But as more of them do CS and more of them learn about H1Bs, maybe more and more people (proportionally) will get pissed off about it for something to happen.
Given the rampant ageism in tech nowadays, you'd better have an exit plan. And so should all these new entrants into the field. More and more, tech jobs should be seen as just stepping stones, not a career in its own right. This was predicted 5 years ago, and people lost their shit over it. "Never going to happen!"
The downside? Well, say you interview as a graduating college senior at Facebook Inc. You may find, to your initial delight, that the place looks just like a fun-loving dorm -- and the adults seem to be missing. But that is a sign of how the profession has devolved in recent years to one lacking in longevity. Many programmers find that their employability starts to decline at about age 35.
Gone by 40
Employers dismiss them as either lacking in up-to-date technical skills -- such as the latest programming-language fad -- or “not suitable for entry level.” In other words, either underqualified or overqualified. That doesn’t leave much, does it? Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40.
Government data show that H-1B software engineers tend to be much younger than their American counterparts. Basically, when the employers run out of young Americans to hire, they turn to the young H-1Bs, bypassing the older Americans.
And then there's the widespread discrimination based on sex and ethnicity. Plus having a pool of talent twice as large means you can dispose of them twice as fast, and it's going to put tremendous downward pressure on wages and working conditions.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Since I don't have any bad college curriculum habits, why not hire me and train me how you need the job done?
How many will make a run for it as soon as they realise that CS is not about developing fancy websites or iOS apps. Dropout numbers are far more interesting. Most of them probably won't get past second semester.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
At my university, we've been watching the explosion of CS majors for the past few years and wondering when the enrollment curve is going to flatten out. So far it shows no signs, with CS already being the largest major in the engineering school.
We are scrambling to find instructors for the new sections that we need to open, and rooms in which to teach them. We're hardly alone - all of our peer institutions are reporting similar trends.
One thing that does concern my colleagues is that a significant portion of the students now entering CS show little aptitude or interest in programming concepts. Students who have failed or dropped the freshman "Introduction to Programming" two or three times in a row absolutely refuse to switch majors. They want that six-figure starting salary, and they will do whatever it takes to get the degree. I am guessing the same thing is happening at every other school that isn't taking some measure to push unqualified students out of CS.
Employers should be prepared to ask a lot of "FizzBuzz" interview questions over the next few years, because quite a few under-qualified CS graduates from prestigious schools are going to be hitting the job market.
Those students will be competing with 85000 h1b visa holders. That is on AVG 1700 h1b visa holders per state.
... will usually be the ones without any formal qualifications who picked up [insert trendy language de jour here] on their own and now write cut and paste sphaggetti code because they have no idea of how to structure a program properly and know next to no useful algorithms. Everything they produce is either mickey mouse code or code blocks from a code site glued together lego brick style and hoping it works.
Just FYI - on my CS course I learnt processor and board architecture, networking (TCP down to ethernet frames + routing principles), AI, relational DBs + normalisation, graphics algorithms, formal proofs and CUI design amongst other things.
I suspect like a lot of people who've never done a degree but work with people who have you have a huge chip on your shoulder and to make yourself feel better you pretend degrees are useless. Well they're not which if you were smart enough to actually get one you'd realise.
Two data points at the beginning and end is not enough to declare a hockey-stick trajectory.
Sure they are-- just plot them on log paper!
Students are flocking to CS majors because they're easier than Gender or Ethnic Studies and require less critical thought. Plus, the CS textbooks have the answers at the end.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I recommended my son take another form of engineering (mechanical/chemical/electrical) when he was looking around over CSCI. Too easy to outsource/offshore CSCI these days and it's likely to get worse.
Just a fad.
You were already programming as a kid and teenager. You'll already have developed some skill set even before setting foot on a college campus. Just getting a degree in CS is not enough. You were living and breathing it before you knew you wanted a career in it.
The best engineers and scientists aren't molded in college or university. I think people just look at career earning potential, see CS and engineering as up there and assume they will make six figures out of college. But so many drop out after the first year or two because reality always sets in. It's a difficult subject and professors in STEM fields of study are not interested in passing you if you don't learn the material. We don't jokingly call it pre-business for nothing.
I don't discourage people from trying it out, but the truth is only a third or less of freshman who start in a technical field of study will graduate with a STEM degree. The statistics here don't lie, and it's not like you can fake your way through 4 years like you can with other areas of study.
I'm now in college for my second time now, first I studied electrical and computer engineering and now software engineering (under a CS major). Due to the large crossover between computer science and engineering I'll get to talking to some computer science students. I've also got to talk to some job recruiters in some rare moments of honesty.
One thing is that many computer science majors want to go on to write code. There's nothing wrong with that, but then they have to take the courses that teach software development. Not many do, because those courses are hard and/or not very interesting. Seems to me that either these people were lied to by their CS advisors and recruiters (as I was) or they didn't have the grades to get into the engineering programs.
I've got to talk to some hiring managers and the like and I've heard them say that they prefer engineering students to computer science. This is because engineering has a more rigorous math requirements, students are required to learn the engineering process, and anyone able to get their engineering degree can pick up a new programming language quickly. These companies are willing to send a new hire to a week long "boot camp" to learn whatever language they are using but not so willing to have to teach someone that learned every language under the sun in their CS coursework how to write good code.
Now there seems to be something of a glut of software developers, at least where I live. I'll hear hiring recruiters say I need more programming experience. I happened into work doing firmware development but when layoffs happened I had trouble finding work again, so I used my GI Bill to go back to school. Having not learned my lesson yet from my experience studying engineering I went to a local university to look at their CS program that just started offering a software engineering "track".
The advisors told me that the CS department was the "lead department" on this software engineering program, that was the first lie, and that the advisors would be helpful in choosing the classes I'd need to complete this "track", the second lie I was told. The advisors are worthless because at any university where CS is in the liberal arts college their goal is the "well rounded adult". They know how to get students to take their foreign language, history, and so forth. What they don't know is how to advise students on what courses to take on actually learning how to write code.
I wasted a year in this stupid CS program because the advisors didn't know what courses actually applied to their own course prerequisites. They pushed me to take courses from the CS department instead of equivalent courses in the engineering school. Then there's the instructors in the CS department that simply cannot help but work political commentary into their lesson plans. A classic CS algorithm called the "stable marriage problem" included a disclaimer from the instructor that it was from a time when same sex marriage was illegal. It's not that 99.9% of the population would rather marry someone of the opposite sex, it's that it was illegal that was the problem, right?
My advice to people that want to get into software development is to get a major in software engineering from a school that has an actual engineering program. Lacking that go major in some engineering discipline and get a CS minor or just take as much programming coursework you can. I found out a year too late that I could have gone to the engineering college, talked to advisors that know what software engineering actually means, and not taken so much bullshit from the liberal arts instructors. I got screwed because now I've got some bad grades in courses that I was not prepared for, and didn't even apply to my CS major, and I can't just switch to engineering any more. Had I gone to the engineering school for their advice on the software engineering program earlier, or talked to the engineering advisors first, I might not be in this predicament. I should have graduated by now but instead I'm looking to take yet another year of classes before I get the education I wanted and that piece of paper that employers want to see.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
When I was about to go to college to be a Computer Science major in 2003, there were people saying I wouldn't have a job when I graduated cause they were all being outsourced to India. Wow have times changed.
Lots of kids will go into Computer Science but not make it through. It will be interesting to find out how many stayed the course for four years and got the CS degree as opposed to those who found it to be more work than they cared to complete.
Tech employers want to offshore as many jobs as they can. And the jobs that cannot be offshored will be given to visa workers.
If you can get a top secret clearance, you will probably be alright.
For nerd herders. *Someone* has to do it. You'll have to have good soft skills though.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
What give him the idea that an workstation a IPMI? for remote power on?
Does this mean that more college students are deciding to major in Computer Science, or students who are majoring in Computer Science are becoming more popular?
What give him the idea that an workstation a IPMI? for remote power on?
I don't recall how it was done in 2007, as I never remotely turned on a workstation as a help desk tech. Where I work today has the 1E client installed on workstations. As a remediation tech, I have to remotely turn on or reboot workstations to get them to patch correctly. The 1E client works most of the time, if it was installed and installed properly.
https://www.1e.com/blogs/2014/12/18/1e-web-wakeup-users-can-wake-computers-anywhere/
There is no money there. The indenture servants from South Asia has driven the labor rates so low, you can't buy pizza with the money.
You're arguing for some sort of union or guild style of organization and instruction. That's not what university is for. University is not there to teach the practical state of the art, it's there to teach the academic state of the art. The tech stack is incidental to that end, and Microsoft has absolutely nothing to do with this topic. There are a lot of people who confuse university with a job training program, and the US government and culture at large has done nothing to discourage this. Computer Science is Turing, McKay, Shannon, Knuth, Dijkstra -- and note how only one of those people ever owned a computer. Both the theoretical and practical are important scopes of knowledge for a programmer, but the university's purview should only be the former.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I know that true Computer Science is a branch of mathematics and that an actual computer isn't necessary for its study, but let's be honest - the overwhelming majority of these folks are going to try and become developers. Given that, I really hope that university programs start focusing on software security, documentation, technical writing, and peer review. The trend today seems to be using whatever hot new modules and stacks are floating out there, assuming (or perhaps not caring) that their authors have made everything secure. Software Engineering is really difficult to do properly in the best of circumstances, let alone when the boss is breathing down your neck and all of your expensive veterans have been run off to be replaced with green employees.
I do write software, but I'm an engineer who just codes to get things done quickly. I've done some work as a Software Engineer when my normal work dried up for a while. The attitudes toward documentation I've seen at work and in the open source community are quite worrying. A lot of emerging technologies are going to be hamstrung by insecure development - smart grids, self-driving cars, Internet of Things, etc.
I know I'm kind of an outsider looking in, but it just feels like we're building our house on a really shaky foundation and everyone is too busy talking about six-figure salaries and massages at work to care.
I mean I'm still surprised how many people who are professional developers who are considered good literally don't know when they should use a link list, an array, or a map so they always use arrays. (Admittedly that's CS102.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Since I kind of remembered when I took that stuff years ago there was probably around a 100 students in CS101 but by the time I graduated it was maybe 10-20
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Just wait for his tweet taking credit for this.
With the big infusion of CS degrees, the market will get far more selective and the big salaries will fade away. The cream of the crop will do fine, if not as well as in the past, but there will be a long tail of people who are really not cut out for the work and never will really be good and will be very disappointed. This has happened to other "glamour" fields in the past, but not to this degree.
Those who don't have the mindset for the work may get a degree. Maybe some will actually get graduate degrees, but will probably never be terribly successful. At the same time, the median salaries are going to start to slide along with the mean skill level of freshly minted BS holders.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
and so far it's all been from math wiz's from another country (India/China) who came here to get a CS degree but grew up in a country w/o easy access to PCs. When I went to college they were the only folks who didn't know a PC inside/out (though it was just the Chinese, there weren't a lot of Indians yet).
What I'm saying is it's not that the schools or the students are bad, it's that they have different backgrounds with odd (by our standards) upbringings.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
but I expect them to go running when they realize that if you're not a math wiz you can't compete with the Indians and their 70+ hour work weeks and borderline indentured servitude.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Potentially with Wake-on-LAN.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Computer science graduates don't want code monkey jobs. They want the software engineer jobs that pay 2x the salary of code monkey jobs. I'm talking about the Google/Apple/Facebook/HFT-calibre jobs that are paying $300K+ total comp in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. A college education provides the foundation of algorithms, computer architecture, programming language semantics, and specialization that allow the graduates to continue working and learning effectively and efficiently, where the diploma is the de facto proof that the student is capable of doing so.
Not much opportunity to practice law as a teenager. Or teachers. Business management. Or a pilot. There are many fields that are just not doable as a kid.
In that case, why were the shepherds in the carol all seated on the ground?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The dot-com bubble broke the priesthood and everyone who could put up a web site. Unfortunately most of those people were clueless. If not for massive virus outbreaks stealing people's credit cards and destroying the web servers that the clueless put up, the dot-com bubble would not have burst so badly. I quoted 20 or so projects for Solaris in that last few months before Melissa, and lost all of the bids to some small company running Windows. Needless to say, all 20 of those people started calling me for help after they lost their servers and customers begging me to help.
My answer then is the same as today. "I'm like the maid, I don't do windows..."
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Given that CS schools tend to have a huge drop off from year one, does an increase enrolment automatically counter that? Seeing a degree through isn't the same as doing the starting courses. That and are the kids who are starting it going on with CS, or going to EE or the Sciences or somewhere else? Data on that? Not so much, or at all.
Note that Stanford CS for one seems to graduate around ~100 a year, even back in the "boom years."
My university has a scary wait list on the computer science department. It's getting so big now it's literally going to have to get its own building soon, and the faculty for it is way understaffed. From my perspective (doing cyber security major under the umbrella of the CS department), they're barely teaching some of these programmers security in coding, and that's really the base of security, to bake it into the software development lifecycle. So perhaps we can expect a flood of programmers who get less security training than we need? I'm kind of curious
In the late 80's, there was a rush of students to the then-new Computer Science majors at universities around the nation. EVERYBODY wanted in. There was the promise of good, high-paying jobs for graduates. Sound familiar?
At my small college, 800 of the 1600 Freshmen at the school enrolled in Computer science. The next year, half of my classmates realized they were in over their heads, and transferred to other majors. This trend continued until graduation, when 25 of us actually completed the major.
Computer science is like art. You either have it or you don't. In both cases, the intrinsic talent must be developed and polished, but there has to be in-born talent to begin with. You can't force it, no matter how much you might like the salaries being promised.
I am not so sure I would advise my grand kids to get a CS degree. I wonder if a trade skill like Electrician or Plumber might be a better choice with a better earning potential and future ;)
They will all have CS skills since their Dad and I are both in the business anyway.
Here's a test I used to give people applying for a job as a programmer over the phone to get a "serious" interview.
1. Use pseudo code to display invoice transactions. Your data set is:
Primary Key: Account number
Secondary key: Transaction date/time
3rd key: transaction number (a hash of the account number, date/time)
Note: Database returns are in ascending key order by default.
2. Use pseudo code to return a list of US coins to add up to $5 dollars.
3. You have 100 feet of property you want to erect a fence on. How many fence poles do you need if you place a post every 10 feet?
4. Describe how DNS works
5. What verbs are available for HTTP?
\\\\\
Answers:
1. If not sorted in reverse date/time order, fail. When you need to look at an order, it is rarely the first one you ever had with us that is the issue.
2. Dollar coin, fifty cent coin frequently missed
3. 10 posts == fail, 11 posts == pass. 11 posts, but you might need another just in case == extra consideration as not all posts can be expected to preform 100% without inspection protocols or in case of error. So it may be worthwhile to have a spare around.
4. Look to see if they mention TCP at all. Most will forget that. If they do, ask when TCP will always be used (large zone file transfers is most common)
5. PUT, POST, GET, HEAD DELETE
Meta:
If I hear a lot of keyboard clicks in the background, I'm assuming they are using a search engine. Not bad in and of itself, it's sometimes faster to find out things via the web. But I will be digging in more for those folks.
They need to score 4 out of 5 to get a in person interview. These days, I'm no longer management and no longer am involved in hiring.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
That will be the future taxi drivers and they will be capable of programming their navigators.
What's not to like?
Looking at the graph on http://insight.ieeeusa.org/ins... there's no resemblance to the "hockey stick" graphs from which the term was coined.
Just another day in Paradise
No, you're just too dumb to distinguish between a mathematical discipline and an engineering one. Computer science has fuck-all to do with electricity. High and low current can be used to implement binary math, but so can any number of other physical phenomena, and the entire point of the discipline is to be able to describe computation independently of the physical world. And you should know as well as anyone that the field was founded by Turing long before an electrical digital computer existed.
Now, you may have meant to say something not-retarded like that computer engineering is impossible without knowing about electricity. You would still be wrong, for the same reason: non-electric computers may not be practical, but they do exist. Of particular note there have been a couple fluid computers, which implemented binary logic using liquids. You may also have heard of optical computation, which has been verging on being a practical technology for a couple decades now.
The point where you need to know about electricity in computers is when you're dealing with the computer on an electrical level. When we start talking about zeros and ones instead of high and low signal, we've started dealing with abstraction (even the high and low signal could be done using either current or voltage). If you're operating at a higher level of abstraction than that, you do not need to know about electricity, and you'll rarely be exposed to it.
Personally, I find an obsession with volts and ohms to be somewhat gauche in a software engineer; When I'm programming I'm not setting voltages in circuits, I'm describing a mathematical operation as a sequence of instructions. We are forced to consider our computations as they are performed in the real world, but only insofar as that may not be abstracted. If you're a hardware engineer then you should also know better, but the electrical fixation may be excused.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
"only one of those people ever owned a computer"
I believe Turing never had a modern computer. More than one of the rest surely had modern computers.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Yeah, this is why you will always produce an inferior product. If you don't know the basics of how things work, you can't possibly understand. Raising the abstraction level only makes things worse. The airline pilot's example is a perfect case in point. If you don't know how to fly the plane, it will eventually catch up with you.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Hey fuckwit. Either find an argument or quit spouting vacuities. Preferably the latter as the amount of public shame you deserve for this is more trouble than it's worth.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Most of the foundational CS work was done before personal computers became available. Knuth I believe has had a number of these, and someone eventually persuaded Dijkstra that he needed a computer for email, but he never wrote anything CS-related with anything other than a fountain pen. The point was not so much that this was literally true, which is subject to some interpretation (the literal truth hinges on "owned" being taken to mean personal ownership rather than mere access), but that in general computer science is the hardware-independent description of what these machines do.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I like you! You're funny
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
My apologies, I hadn't realized that you had nothing to add to any discussion and are just here to troll.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Au contraire mon cheri! It is you that is trolling. Take another look at those nasty responses you sent me that indeed contributed nothing but rage. But by all means...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If you completely ignore the argument, then yes, there's nothing but rage. I presented a reasoned argument (that yes, happened to insult your intelligence) and examples to support my point, and your response...I mean, I hope you're proud of it. As far as I'm concerned that one remark makes you a complete jerk, and further supports my opinion of your intelligence. I had thought that you were among the persons here who could occasionally be trusted to supply more light than heat in a discussion. I've certainly corrected that opinion.
However, it's not a total loss. This subject will actually make a pretty good blog post.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I presented a reasoned argument
That's funny as hell, Comicus. You did no such thing.. "Hey fuckit" is hardly a reasoned argument.. But hey, I don't mind at all. I always prefer that people express their feelings honestly. For that reason, *I am and always will be your friend*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You might look at the preceding post then, in which many points of fact are raised.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
This one, right? Sorry bub, you're off your rocker if you expect me to take you seriously.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Hmmm. You know, it almost looked like that, except it was the one I linked. Which gave several examples of computation not involving electricity, but I did forget cellular automata, so that's another category of things. "You're off your rocker." is not an argument.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
"You're off your rocker." is not an argument.
Who told you it was?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The expectation is that you either back up your beliefs when challenged or demonstrate the incorrectness of the opposing argument. You seem to need a great deal of instruction. It's okay, since you said we were friends then I don't mind explaining.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
the opposing argument
"opposing argument"? Where? All I saw were attempts to offend. Just so you know, that's impossible. All words are totally ethereal.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Not a problem, friend of friends! I'm happy to repeat myself.
You see, it's possible to build computers out of things that don't involve electricity. People have used mechanical devices, living cells, fluids, photons, and even the mechanism of human intellect. Additionally, electrical computers do not actually expose their electrical nature beyond the circuit level; the zeros-and-ones abstraction is pretty fundamental, and certainly nothing else is available at the OS level. Thus we can say that electricity is incidental to computation. Personally I'd give about half odds that optical computing will be the dominant paradigm in a hundred years.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
That's like saying the food we eat and our circulation system is incidental to living. You don't need to know all the details to live, but if you want to know the science/engineering behind it, you better have an inkling of the basics. Abstractions will fail you if you don't understand the fundamentals. To an electronic computer electricity is most fundamental. Those 1s and 0s control relays and valves that operate a 50ton press. Know your truth tables well :-)
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Thank you for responding. I'm afraid that I must continue to disagree with you. I don't think that food:human life is a good analogy to electricity:computation, as food is necessary for life, and computation is often performed without electricity. The most popular alternative would probably be the mechanism of the human mind. This is an argument of definition: the only way that one can consider electricity an essential requirement of computation is to redefine the term to exclude all other forms of computation.
From the user's or programmer's perspective computer is designed to be a tool for symbolic/logical manipulation, and the underlying mechanisms are entirely hidden. This is actually necessary to the modern concept of an electric computer, as bit sequences are stored and transmitted in many different ways: as radio signals, as magnetically aligned sectors on a disk, as a charge in a capacitor, or as a signal on a bus. This is not an easily-pierced abstraction, and when it does fail it's usually synonymous with hardware failure. As logical constructs, these zeros and ones should be considered as derivative from mathematics, not electricity.
The original claim was that computer science required a knowledge of physics, which is broadly incorrect. There are places such as information theory and quantum computing where physics and CS intersect, but it's entirely possible to have a career in CS without ever considering the computer as more than a logical abstraction: Turing and Dijkstra proved all their theorems with fountain pens. If you're particularly gifted you might program this way today (although using something like APL might be advisable).
So in general, we may say that the real world as a whole is incidental to computer science, in much the same way that in mathematics we consider the real world to be a special case :) Software engineers should know a bit more about the real world, but probably not much more than high school physics. If you want to do anything remotely interesting with hardware, you would of course have far more need of a strong physics background, but probably there are more applications than not which are hardware-agnostic.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Tautology, and begging the question.
You don't need to know anything about electricity to understand data structures and algorithms.
But you know this, right?