Thoughts after reading Princeton professor foresees computer science revolution;
This is a thought-provoking piece, even being as short as it is. Chazelle suggests that computing may still end up as disruptive as quantum mechanics, which is hard for me to imagine — but that only makes the statement more interesting. Neils Bohr once said, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it,” which I think is a fair statement. It’s difficult to imagine making the same statement about computer science, but there you have it. Computer science; shocking? No, it’s not the first adjective to come to mind; then again, that depends on your point of view.
Chazelle mentioned how Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach inspired a generation of computer science students, which I think is also quite perceptive. (I would count myself as being among those pushed toward computer science by this book.) Most of this book, however, is not overtly “about” computer science; it’s about music, art, recursion, Godel’s incompleteness theorem, and the relationships between all of the above. It turns out that all these ideas do have application to computer science, and a great deal of the book is also about artificial intelligence, and whether or not it is even possible. Hofstadter believes that it is, though he freely admits that it would be unimaginably complex to implement, and posits the idea that the ability of the human mind to comprehend paradox, and the complete inability of a machine to do so, holds the key (or part of the key) to understanding artificial intelligence. It doesn’t hurt that the book is also extremely imaginative and humorous, markedly with that odd brand of humor frequently associated with computer science, such as that of the Jargon file.
Given the richness of the book, it isn’t hard to see how it could have fired many imaginations about how interesting computer science really is; it also isn’t hard to see that there have not been many books since then which could say the same.
LISP is probably one of the most interesting languages there is, from a “computer science” perspective… and Lisp is one of the oldest languages still in use. There are plenty of new, more-or-less interesting languages: Python, Ruby, Java, C# — but none of these is necessarily as different from their predecessors as most other languages are from LISP. There are also plenty of just plain strange programming languages, but those are mainly joke languages. Where are the new programming languages that are pushing the boundaries of computer science? (Note: I don’t claim to know about all the interesting things being developed right now, and would welcome being corrected on this; if you know of some fascinating new language, feel free to leave a pointer in a comment.)
I’m not finding much more to add, so I’ll close with a couple lines from the article:
Mathematics has long been the lingua franca, the Esperanto, of science. But I would argue that science now has two Esperantos: math and computer science.
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I think that computer science bears an uncanny resemblance to pre-Einstein physics… I predict that there will be an Einstein of computer scientists. The revolution is yet to come.
