No one. That’s who. Well, not as many of us as we might have thought. Since the real power of “thinking like a computer scientist” is leveraging abstraction as a means of managing and containing complexity, it makes sense that we are moving away from an era in which every computer scientist needs to have a soup-to-nuts understanding of computers. No single human being can full comprehend an entire computer system, and it’s not clear that we should be training computer scientists with this as a goal.
But this does raise some questions about how our students will handle the abstraction of concepts that they don’t fully (need) to understand.
Seth Battis March 3rd, 2008
Posted In: Computer Science
Tags: abstraction, assembly code, complexity, Computer Science, education
