• frezik@midwest.social
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      5 months ago

      Depends. A proper computer science course is basically math with machines. At the highest level, it may have zero programming at all, and the machines in question are entirely abstract.

      Software Engineering is, well, engineering (setting aside the whole debate on what makes a “real” engineer).

      It used to be that universities crammed both under “computer science”, and you had to look at the curriculum to figure out which one they were actually teaching. They tend to separate the two more clearly these days. Neither is really “science” in the strictest sense, but the term stuck now.

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          5 months ago

          No, the machines tend to be abstract. Such as an infinite paper tape that can manipulate symbols.

        • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          No, computer engineering tends to focus more on hardware. When I was doing that kind of thing in college, computer engineering did things like chip design and logic boards and so on. I had courses on DSP and VLSI, multiple assembly languages, RISC vs CISC systems, and so on. In my university, it was considered a subspecializqtion of electrical engineering, with the first two years of undergraduate study being identical.

          When I switched over to CS, I was doing things like numerical analysis and software systems architecture.

          Both majors used math, but CE (as an EE major) required students to go through (iirc) calculus 5, and I think that CS majors could stop at calc 3 but would end up having to do different kinds of math after that.

    • yetAnotherUser@feddit.de
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      5 months ago

      That’s why informatics is by far the superior term. Computer science is such a boring terms anyways, you don’t call maths “number science”, biology "living beings science " or chemistry “atoms science” either.

    • lobut@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      My geophysicist friend laughed at me for a little long when I said “I’m a computer scientist”.

      I never took that degree/job position or whatever seriously anyway. I’ve always giggled at software engineering too. I just call myself a programmer.

      • Windex007@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        One is your education and one is your job. It’d be like me chirping someone with a geophysics degree who’s working at Starbucks.

        • lobut@lemmy.ca
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          5 months ago

          lol, okay that made me chuckle … I liked that.

          Although, we both eventually got into the jobs for what we studied for. We’ve made that jokes both in university and when we got into respective fields.