Software engineering & computer science

 Software engineering & computer  science 

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Software engineering: Software engineering is the study of designing, implementing, and modifying the software in order to ensure it is of high quality, affordable, maintainable, and fast to build. It is a systematic approach to software design, involving the application of engineering practices to software. Software engineering deals with the organizing and analyzing of software—it doesn't just deal with the creation or manufacture of new software, but its internal maintenance and arrangement.

Discoveries: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's, George Boole's, Alan Turing's, Claude Shannon's, and Samuel Morse's insight: there are only two objects that a computer has to deal with in order to represent "anything".

All the information about any computable problem can be represented using only 0 and 1 (or any other bistable pair that can flip-flop between two easily distinguishable states, such as "on/off", "magnetized/de-magnetized", "high-voltage/low-voltage", etc.).

See also: Digital physics

Alan Turing's insight: there are only five actions that a computer has to perform in order to do "anything".

Every algorithm can be expressed in a language for a computer consisting of only five basic instructions:

move left one location;

move right one location;

read symbol at the current location;

print 0 at the current location;

print 1 at the current location.

See also: Turing machine

Corrado Böhm and Giuseppe Jacopini's insight: there are only three ways of combining these actions (into more complex ones) that are needed in order for a computer to do "anything".[65]

Only three rules are needed to combine any set of basic instructions into more complex ones:

sequence: first do this, then do that;

selection: IF such-and-such is the case, THEN do this, ELSE do that;

repetition: WHILE such-and-such is the case DO this.

Programming paradigms

Programming languages can be used to accomplish different tasks in different ways. Common programming paradigms include:

Functional programming, a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs that treat computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It is a declarative programming paradigm, which means programming is done with expressions or declarations instead of statements.

Imperative programming, a programming paradigm that uses statements that change a program's state. In much the same way that the imperative mood in natural languages expresses commands, an imperative program consists of commands for the computer to perform. Imperative programming focuses on describing how a program operates.

Object-oriented programming, a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which may contain data, in the form of fields, often known as attributes; and code, in the form of procedures, often known as methods. A feature of objects is that an object's procedures can access and often modify the data fields of the object with which they are associated. Thus Object-oriented computer programs are made out of objects that interact with one another

Academia

Conferences are important events for computer science research. During these conferences, researchers from the public and private sectors present their recent work and meet. Unlike in most other academic fields, in computer science, the prestige of conference papers is greater than that of journal publications. One proposed explanation for this is the quick development of this relatively new field requires rapid review and distribution of results, a task better handled by conferences than by journals

Education

Computer Science, known by its near-synonyms, Computing, Computer Studies, Information Technology (IT) and Information and Computing Technology (ICT), has been taught in UK schools since the days of batch processing, mark sensitive cards and paper tape but usually to a select few students.]In 1981, the BBC produced a micro-computer and classroom network and Computer Studies became common for GCE O level students (11–16-year-old), and Computer Science to A-level students. Its importance was recognized, and it became a compulsory part of the National Curriculum, for Key Stage 3 & 4. In September 2014 it became an entitlement for all pupils over the age of 4

In the US, with 14,000 school districts deciding the curriculum, provision was fractured. According to a 2010 report by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), only 14 out of 50 states have adopted significant education standards for high school computer science