Thread: Is Computer Science dead or very much alive?

All I can say that is programming is not disappearing. If anything, it is increasing with new fields and challenges that waits ahead. Heck, if you do IT, then you are pretty much guaranteed to find jobs.

I have moved this thread to General Discussions.

Originally Posted by Alegomaster

Do something with quantum computing. Its a brand new world with that.

Wonder if C++ would work on quantum computer. Pointer was bad enough, imagine you put something on the heap, and it creates a black hole and suck you in.

Originally Posted by nimitzhunter

Wonder if C++ would work on quantum computer. Pointer was bad enough, imagine you put something on the heap, and it creates a black hole and suck you in.

That black hole may take you to an alternative universe where few people know programming. Can you imagine? You'd be their god! Hell, even if it got me back to 60s, i'd be one of the best programmers. Then i might have been a lead developer of MS-DOS, and believe me, things would have been different!!!

Originally Posted by nimitzhunter

Wonder if C++ would work on quantum computer. Pointer was bad enough, imagine you put something on the heap, and it creates a black hole and suck you in.

Seriously though, quantum computers would almost certainly exist as an entirely different architecture until now unheard of. Any programming language in existence today would probably be obsolete and incapable of being upgraded to handle this new architecture. The approach to problem-solving in a quantum computer cannot, I seem to think, be in any way similar to our current deterministic models.

That said, quantum computers are often seen as the future of computation. I strongly disagree. There's no reason to think Quantum computers will handle certain tasks more efficiently. There's plenty of papers on that, although there seems to be some disagreement on what exactly these computers would be good and bad for. Nevertheless everyone seems to agree quantum computers do have specific and important uses that could make them invaluable in key areas. But as a domestic computer, they would probably be useless.

The real progress in computation and the one that seems much more promising is, in my opinion, the research and discovery of new, faster, and more reliable, circuits and ways to store and access data while retaining our current deterministic models. the current research in molecular-based computing for instance, would give us an impressive increase in computational power, greatly reduce (some even argue all but entirely eliminate) power consumption, and introduce computers into a vast array of new applications; nanobots being the one with the most press.

If we can get rid of our silicon dependency we may have just given the next big leap in the history of computation. And, interesting enough, no reason to suspect the current languages and programming disciplines would become obsolete.

I heard that bacteria can store a lot of data. Instead of solid state drive, we will have squishy squashy state drive. I kinda want a biobased computer. Imagine the day that we will feed and clean the poops of our computers and pet them and walk them.

Originally Posted by nimitzhunter

I heard that bacteria can store a lot of data. Instead of solid state drive, we will have squishy squashy state drive. I kinda want a biobased computer. Imagine the day that we will feed and clean the poops of our computers and pet them and walk them.

I don't want that, plugging in the Ethernet cable would get nasty

Originally Posted by ಠ_ಠ

I don't want that, plugging in the Ethernet cable would get nasty

That comment made me lol.

I believe the biggest issue is the thermal overheating at the core of the CPU that prevents higher clock speeds. The cooling just cannot reach through the entire CPU core to provide effective cooling. A change may come to that, though, by building cube-like cores with cooling in-between.
Other than that, bottlenecks are basically the bus speeds, no?

Ah, I see what you were thinking now. You were thinking of trying to eliminate the buses by changing the architecture. But I was thinking of speeding up the buses and decreasing the lag in communication.