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and hardware. Clearly defi ning the relationship between computer science
and computer programming was much more diffi cult and problematic.
On the surface, the relationship between the two seems obvious:
computer science was the theoretical basis underlying the practical occu-
pation of computer programming. Dijkstra had implied as much in his
“Humble Programmer” lecture, and most of his contemporaries would
have agreed that there was at least some relationship between the two.
But what exactly was the nature of this relationship? As we have seen,
computer programming in the 1950s was generally regarded as an inher-
ently undisciplined and unscientifi c activity. Computer programmers
prided themselves on their clever and idiosyncratic solutions to problems.
Most working programmers in this period had no formal education in
computing, and many did not even possess a college degree. By the end
of the 1950s, as discussed earlier, many employers had started question-
ing the value of mathematics to most commercial programming. Indeed,
the only fi rm conclusion one review of the literature on the selection of
computer programmers at this time identifi ed was that “majoring in
mathematics was not found to be signifi cantly related to performance as
a programmer!”
56
Computer scientists expressed disdain for professional
programmers, and professional programmers responded by accusing
computer science of being overly abstract or irrelevant.
57
Much more will
be said about this confl ict between theory and practice in this and sub-
sequent chapters. For the time being, it is important only to note that
the professionalization strategies pursued by academic computer scien-
tists were distinct from those of professional business programmers. The
skills and abilities that were rewarded within the university hierarchy
were not necessarily valued within the corporate environment.
The struggle to defi ne a unique intellectual identity for computer
science played itself out over the course of the 1960s in the development
of specifi c programs, departments, and curriculum. The fi rst of these
refl ected the origins of computing research in computing centers and
mathematics departments. They included a mix of courses in numerical
analysis, Boolean algebra, and statistics, combined with more practical
training in programming.
58
Over the next decade, the more research-
oriented programs expanded to include offerings in artifi cial intelligence,
automata theory, and computational complexity. As the historian
Michael Mahoney has argued, this conglomeration of concepts and
techniques did represent a convergence on a shared intellectual agenda
for theoretical computer science.
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But to a certain degree, computer
science in the early 1960s did also appear, at least from the outside,
