amen zwa, esq. on Nostr: When FORTRAN was being designed by Backus and his colleagues at IBM in 1956, the ...

When FORTRAN was being designed by Backus and his colleagues at IBM in 1956, the modern #IT industry was simultaneously being hatched. In those early days, #programming was a #mathematical activity.

Some three decades later, in the 1990s, many universities still taught their #CS students the theoretical foundations of the discipline: discrete mathematics, algorithmic analysis, complexity theory, computability theory, category theory, and so on.

Now though, there are some interviewees, with CS PhD from reputable state universities, who cannot analyse a well known algorithm, let alone designing one from scratch. And forget about computability theory, complexity theory, category theory, the lot. But they know Python and PyTorch—naturally!

In just seven decades, our field went from being largely mathematical while resting upon the shoulders of intellectual giants like von Neumann, Church, Turing, Kleene, Backus, Knuth, Cook, Scott, et al., to being completely gut-feel while labouring under the yoke of industrial giant LLMs.