Reply to the Atlantic: The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Not really surprising when it is the overwhelming view of parents on this board that the humanities are a complete waste of time, and everyone needs to be studying CS to make maximum $$ in tech or finance.[/quote]

Meanwhile some of the very best minds in actual computer science - not software engineering or cowboy coding or being an elite "hacker," but the people who invented the very concepts that drive computing - will tell you the liberal arts are critical to their thinking.[/quote]

Although it tends to be philosophy and logic vs reading fiction.

Einstein loved the great thinkers, but you don’t read about him extolling the virtues of literature authors.[/quote]

No, that's not at all what I was thinking of, actually (although formal logic is HUGE for quickly grasping boolean logic and I do love the synergy between philosophy and computing).

It's hard to find a single short article by Richard P. Gabriel, but he has a whole book on the relationship between Writer's Workshops and coding that's now available online because it's out of print - https://dreamsongs.com/Files/WritersWorkshop.pdf

Plus:

http://bwl-website.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/10-SPEGuestEditorial/WebPage.html
https://paulgraham.com/hp.html

We wouldn't have software design patterns if the guys behind that hadn't read the architecture book A Pattern Language (like Gabriel, above).

Anyone who doesn't realize that computer science works best embedded in the liberal arts just hasn't bothered with the history of the discipline - probably because they don't know enough about the value of the liberal arts to care about history.[/quote]

Who are your referring when you talk about the best minds in computer science?  Are you going back to Babbage or are we talking about modern computer science?

Liberal arts is much, much more than literature.  Literature is a fairly small component.

Architecture books of course aren’t literature either.[/quote]

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