https://levelup.gitconnected.com/the-end-of-programming-6e3f7ff0d8b4
"I came of age in the 1980s, programming personal computers like the Commodore
VIC-20 and Apple ][e at home. Going on to study Computer Science in college and
ultimately getting a PhD at Berkeley, the bulk of my professional training was
rooted in what I will call “classical” CS: programming, algorithms, data
structures, systems, programming languages. In Classical Computer Science, the
ultimate goal is to reduce an idea to a program written by a human — source
code in a language like Java or C++ or Python. Every idea in Classical CS — no
matter how complex or sophisticated — from a database join algorithm to the
mind-bogglingly obtuse Paxos consensus protocol — can be expressed as a
human-readable, human-comprehendible program.
When I was in college in the early ’90s, we were still in the depth of the AI
Winter, and AI as a field was likewise dominated by classical algorithms. My
first research job at Cornell was working with Dan Huttenlocher, a leader in
the field of computer vision (and now Dean of the MIT School of Computing). In
Dan’s PhD-level computer vision course in 1995 or so, we never once discussed
anything resembling deep learning or neural networks—it was all classical
algorithms like Canny edge detection, optical flow, and Hausdorff distances.
Deep learning was in its infancy, not yet considered mainstream AI, let alone
mainstream CS.
Of course, this was 30 years ago, and a lot has changed since then, but one
thing that has not really changed is that Computer Science is taught as a
discipline with data structures, algorithms, and programming at its core. I am
going to be amazed if in 30 years, or even 10 years, we are still approaching
CS in this way. Indeed, I think CS as a field is in for a pretty major upheaval
that few of us are really prepared for."
Via Wayne Radinsky.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
