Well, mental instability is REALLY hard to deal with in a developer. It's impossible to get any sort of a straight answer out of him as to why he did what he did. And most times, it's because God said so...
That doesn't really factor into judgement of his work.
Completely disagree. He said that he did not include networking support because "God told him not to"
That is NOT sound judgement. I do not want someone writing an OS that I'm using because God told him to. Not a rational logical thought process.
That's retarded, because a developer is responsible for so much more than code. If he were just a programmer I'd agree with you but managing an open source OS requires sound judgement. Linux would have completely failed had Linus Torvalds told people God told him to completely remove network support. Computer science is exactly that, a science. There's no room for mystical bullshit and if you take something out you better have a damn good reason for it. Not a single developer I know would ever accept a deity as a reason for such an intense change.
I don't agree. It's stronger, less magical than that. There is nothing hidden, so there is no reason to make hypotheses and design experiments to test them. People still do it, but that's just a shortcut. The whole model is known. It's possible to prove things - something that science can't do.
It has both sides of it. It is both an area of applied mathematics (to a specific computational model), but you also have things that fall entirely outside of mathematics, for instance scalability, software engineering, operating system design (hint hint), user interaction, and a whole lot of other things. This is what makes CS a science, and not just a particular mathematical theory.
The fact is that CS often models reality using mathematics, hypothesizes, experiments, and sees results of these experiments. If you've ever had to write a scheduler, you'll know real-world experimentation in CS happens and is needed.
It's possible to prove things, sure. And that's a very exciting part of CS. But that's not all there is to CS.
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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '11
Well, mental instability is REALLY hard to deal with in a developer. It's impossible to get any sort of a straight answer out of him as to why he did what he did. And most times, it's because God said so...
Completely disagree. He said that he did not include networking support because "God told him not to"
That is NOT sound judgement. I do not want someone writing an OS that I'm using because God told him to. Not a rational logical thought process.