Here are a few things that I’ve heard non-cs people say about Computer Science, and from what I’ve seen most of these views are quite widespread, but being a programmer myself, I’ve found these things to be quite false:
- Computers change so quickly that all code and knowledge become obsolete in a few years.
My Views: x86 as an ISA has been around since 1985, and I’m pretty sure most old x86 code will work on modern processors. Even the new x86-64 processors can run x86 instructions. C is even more portable. A code written in C 35 years ago should work if re-compiled today (although methinks the standards have changed somewhat). Programming knowledge doesn’t really become obsolete. The fundamentals of C apply to newer languages like Java, and will most-definitely apply to the languages of the future.
- Syntax is the hardest part of programming.
I’ve heard tons of people say “I could program a computer easily if it were programmable in English”. But I quickly learned that this isn’t the case. Computer Science is 1% syntax, 99% programming logic. The two big challenges are: understanding the machine/virtual machine and building an algorithm that efficiently solves the problem at hand. English would be a horrible programming language due to its inherit ambiguity and reliance on subjective context.
