Computer Science (CS) is a strange field. Who would think you could take a bunch of sand, run some electricity through it, and it would do your math homework for you? I have studied computers inside and out for about four years now and my best explanation as to how they work is still, "magic." Computers have always fascinated me, I guess that is why I got into the field. CS in college, however, is not at all what I expected it to be. I figured I would be writing games like Doom by my Junior year. Well, it is my Senior year and I still probably couldn't write Doom. Apparently, software is no longer written by one person. It is written by committees of underpants gnomes bent on world domination. So basically the goal of a CS program is (or should be) to take normally isolated, anti-social geeks and make them play well with others. I still hate group projects.
If you noticed, I began typing CS instead of Computer Science after the first sentence. This is because computer professionals must be inherently lazy and refer to everything in acronyms. Have ever seen Good Morning Vietnam with Robin Williams? Well in one scene to mock his commanding officer he uses every military acronym he can think of in one sentence. That is what my classes are like everyday. It seems that CS professionals like to give things really complicated names, like Symmetric List Processor just so the acronym can be something witty like SLIP. Usually the words symmetric, dynamic, and most other -ic words have little meaning. If you don't believe me about the number of acronyms, just look around here for a while and you will begin to know what I mean. Acronyms are helpful though because they allow us to not have to learn how to spell anything larger than a 5 letter word.
The program I mentioned earlier, SLIP, was actually a pretty big breakthrough in the '70's by a guy named Joseph Weizenbaum. He really had some interesting ideas about the roles of computers in society. So you don't have to experience the pain I have gone though, I will tell you what his book says instead of you reading it for yourself. You're welcome. He basically says that we should not computerize everything and that if computer scientists don't start thinking before they create new technologies, the world is going to end and it will be our fault. Some of the things he said we shouldn't do, like voice recognition, have already happened so it may be a prophecy of our own impending doom. Oh well. It is sometimes scary (when people are involved) and sometimes funny (when they aren't) at what can happen with just one simple mistake. Well, no software is perfect.
Some of you may be wondering why the pirate quote is at the top of this page
and the main computer page. Well, there is a good explanation for that, but
it might land me in jail. Lets just say that there is a hypothetical person
named Prest Bob. Well, if Bob uses software he didn't pay for, he is
called a pirate. A software pirate, arr matey! Well many corporations are
evil
and therefore using pirated software is merely rebellion against the money
hungry tyrannical leaders. It could also be that Bob is very cheap. An alternative
to software piracy or getting a job is open source software. It is free to
download legally! Much of the software I use is open source, but that discussion
is for another page.