AtomicBaboon!?!

This is something I have seen people discussing quite a bit recently. I find the question itself laughable and it betrays the lack of understanding on the part of the person asking the question. The question "Is Computer Science Dead?" People think that because there are off the shelf solutions for things like accounting, customer information management, enterprise data management, etc. that we don't need computer scientists any more and they cite the rapid decline of people entering the field in the last 5 to 10 years as a sign of this.

What strikes me as odd is that people forget where all this off the shelf software comes from. The technology that makes it possible for Jimmy to drag and drop his VB application into existence turning him into an uber windows programmer didn't just spring into existence. Computer scientists develop the tools and technology that makes it possible for pretty much anyone to do anything with a computer. They aren't always computer scientists in the sense that they have a piece of paper that says that on it, but that is what computer science is. Without them writing things like compilers, drivers, operating systems, and doing all the dirty work Jimmy won't have software that allows him to drag and drop VB and Flash applications.

We don't have magical technology fairies that just deliver unto us the necessary, low-level tools that make it all possible. We need smart people that actually know how computers work to create those tools. That need will never go away. However, I will say that computer science in the United States may be dying and I don't see that as a good thing.

Too many people here don't understand what it takes to make these things do what they do. I run into people who know how to use Flash, VB, Access, Excel, or any number of other user tools that like to call themselves programmers and knowledgeable computer experts, and expect to be treated as such. I run into people who may actually be good programmers and can actually write software and because of that they expect to be considered on the same level as a computer scientist. In my experience, these two attitudes are common. Unfortunately they are also naive and often times incorrect.

You might be the worlds greatest VB user, and be able to make all sorts of nifty little windows applications, but that doesn't make you a computer expert. You might be able to write a killer, light-weight HTTP server, but that doesn't make you a computer scientist. Being able to do those things does not mean you have the skill set necessary to write a new process scheduler for Linux, optimize a SCSI driver, write a compiler. It doesn't give you a working knowledge of what a computer is actually doing as opposed to what the tools you use allow you to make it do. Think of it as similar to the difference between a kindergartner with a box of 16 crayons drawing a picture for Mommy and Da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa. While the little tyke might be a talented little scribbler, he doesn't understand why colors do what they do or how to stretch his own canvas among a myriad of other things.

Behind the animation, the slick interfaces, the auto calculated values, and self populating fields are layers of code containing complex algorithms, binary floating-point arithmetic, and shifting bits... someone needs to know how that works! Until the need for computer scientists to do what they do some how disappears I don't see how the profession can die. It got us where we are today and it is taking us where we are headed tomorrow.

Is Computer Science Dead?
The death of computing