Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
5
The Rise of Computer Science
At present there is a fl avor of “game-playing” about many courses in computer
science. I hear repeatedly from friends who want to hire good software people
that they have found the specialist in computer science is someone they do not
want.
Their experience is that graduates in our programs seem to be mainly
interested in playing games, making fancy programs that really do not work,
writing trick programs, etc.
—Richard Hamming, “One Man's View of Computer Science,” 1968
The Humble Programmer
The fi rst computer programmers came from a wide variety of occupa-
tional and educational backgrounds. Some were recruited from the ranks
of the female “human computers” who had participated in wartime
manual computation projects. Others were former clerical workers or
tabulating machine operators with experience in corporate data process-
ing. A few were erstwhile scientists and engineers drawn into computing
in pursuit of intellectual or professional opportunities.
For this last group of well-educated “converts” to computing, it was
not always clear where their adopted discipline stood in relation to
more traditional intellectual activities. Although the electronic computers
were increasingly used in this period as
instruments
of scientifi c produc-
tion, their status as legitimate
objects
of scientifi c and professional scru-
tiny had not yet been established. Scientists and engineers who drifted
out of the “respectable” disciplines into the uncharted waters of elec-
tronic computing faced self-doubt, professional uncertainty, and even
ridicule.
One such emigrant from the sciences was the physicist-turned-
programmer Edsger Dijkstra. In the early 1950s, as a result of “a long
series of coincidences” associated with his doctoral research in theoreti-
cal physics, Dijkstra became the fi rst person in his native Holland to
