[lbo-talk] the view from capital

[Andy F]

On 9/11/06, Steve Palmer <spalmer999 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> But so-called 'computing science', at least in the United States, is a soft
> science, and is closer to the arts and 'social sciences'. Peter Neumann's Risks
> Forum is a catalog of cockups by 'computer science' which would not be
> tolerated in a real science. Usually nobody gets hurt - just a lot of money and
> resources wasted. The THERAC-25 incident illustrates the dangers when this kind
> of thinking meets hard problems (bug in the software made a cancer radiation
> machine fry the patients).

You're thinking of computer engineering or at least software
engineering (hardware seems to have far fewer snafus).  Computer
science is the study of the math behind it.

And, yes, software engineering is an egregiously bad state, though
there's plenty of pressure from above to do it wrong, too.

-- 
Andy