From: utzoo!decvax!duke!unc!smb Newsgroups: net.misc Title: Re: Social Scientists as Pinkos Article-I.D.: unc.3549 Posted: Tue Jun 15 18:31:54 1982 Received: Thu Jun 17 03:56:30 1982 Fred Brooks has made a useful distinction between 'science' and 'engineering': A scientist builds in order to study; an engineer studies in order to build. What is the ultimate goal of what we do? Eventually -- and it may be several layers removed -- the aim of computer science is to aid someone in producing answers to some problem outside the field. Whether we do that by writing better editors, or by designing more efficient sorting algorithms, or by devising programming languages that make it easier to write correct programs isn't important; what is important is that the goal *of the field* is not knowledge itself, but to produce tools useful for others. (Please note that I'm not saying that the results of "science" can't or shouldn't be used to build better mousetraps; obviously, that's nonsense. Nor am I saying anything about the motivations of any individual researchers; just as there are applied physicists, there are theoreticians in computer science. I'm speaking of the intent of the field as a whole.) --Steve Bellovin