The threats to computing science

Selected excerpts from the address delivered at the ACM 1984 South Central Regional Conference, 16–18 November 1984. Original paragraph order is preserved; omissions are marked with […].

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The Fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.

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I called this focus on hardware a distortion because we know by now that electronic engineering can contribute no more than the machinery, and that the general purpose computer is no more than a handy device for implementing any thinkable mechanism without changing a single wire. That being so, the key question is what mechanisms we can think of without getting lost in the complexities of our own making. Not getting lost in the complexities of our own making and preferably reaching that goal by learning how to avoid the introduction of those complexities in the first place, that is the key challenge computing science has to meet.

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Since the Romans have taught us "Simplex Veri Sigillum" —that is: simplicity is the hallmark of truth— we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. When you give for an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audience feels cheated and leaves the lecture hall commenting to each other: "That was rather trivial, wasn't it?" The sore truth is that complexity sells better. (It is not only the computer industry that has discovered that.) And it is even more diabolical in that we even use the complexity of our own constructs to impress ourselves. I have often been impressed by the cleverness of my own first solutions; invariably the joy of the subsequent discovery how to streamline the argument was tempered by a feeling of regret that my cleverness was unnecessary after all. It is a genuine sacrifice to part from one's ingenuities, no matter how contorted, Also, many a programmer derives a major part of his professional excitement from not quite understanding what he is doing, from the daring risks he takes and from the struggle to find the bugs he should not have introduced in the first place.

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The major attraction of the modern elixirs is that they relieve their consumers from the obligation of being precise by presenting an interface too fuzzy to be precise in: by suppressing the symptoms of impotence they create an illusion of power.

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As I said earlier, the programmable computer is no more and no less than a handy device for the implementation of any thinkable mechanism. As such it poses on us the burden to demonstrate which mechanisms we can think of sufficiently clearly. It implies the challenge of blending Engineering with the techniques of Scientific Thought; this challenge is exciting and we are ready for it.