Fran Allen Sees Computer Science as Science

Seibel: Do you think of yourself as a scientist, an engineer, an artist, or a draftsman? Allen: I think of myself as a computer scientist I was involved in my corner of the field in helping it develop. And those were interesting times—the emergence of computer science—because there was a Ic lot of question about, "Is this a science? Anything that has to have science in its name n't a science." And it was certainly unclear to me what it meant. But compilers were a very old field—older than...

 Bernie Cosell on the Complexity of Modern Programming

So I don't envy modern programmers, and It's going to get worse. The simple things are getting packaged into libraries, leaving only the hard things. That stuff is getting so complicated, but the standards that people are expecting are stunning. One of the ones ^i^ey showed me stunned me. He was showing me Google Maps that will do I routes for you. One of the things you can Jo is you can grab a piece of the route with ^our mouse and drag that piece of the route somewhere else to tell Google t...

 L Peter Deutsch on Why Programing is so Hard

One of the things that I've been thinking about off and on over the last five-plus years is, "Why is programming so hard?" You have the algorithmic side of programming and that's i close enough to mathematics that you can use mathematics as the basic model, if you will, for what goes on in it. You can use mathematical methods and mathematical ways of thinking.That doesn't make it easy, but nobody thinks mathematics is easy. So there's a pretty good match between the material you're working ...