In some ways computers are more fun today -- we have plenty of computational power & memory to do things we never dreamed of being able to do in our lifetimes, and this power is cheap enough that we can do it in the privacy of our own homes without having to write grant proposals. So _something_ is working. What isn't fun anymore is doing research in or teaching CS. Very few institutions or research agencies are interested in fundamental problems -- they want you to work on making this seriously ugly chip or program 3% faster/cheaper. I think that Neal Koblitz's article addresses this issue a bit when he talks about the tremendous pressure to publish the largest number of "smallest publishable units", rather than waiting to put together a longer paper together which really addresses a problem in depth. Knuth is an anachronism -- he's a Victorian thinker (akin to Darwin or Hamilton or Maxwell) in the 21st century. He writes no paper or book "before its time". Which is why most of us on this group love him so much. When Microsoft killed all innovation in the PC, interesting people moved to innovating media players and cellphones. When cellphone services (Verizon/Sprint/Vodaphone) began crippling cellphones due to marketing brain damage, interesting people moved to distributed systems ("motes", etc.) and robotics. The commercial software business (e.g., "mainframe") has become so deadeningly boring that to a first approximation, there are no interesting people left in this field at all (at least in the US). My father worked for Ford Motor Company in the 1950's in the Edsel division (don't laugh). At least they were trying to do some sort of innovation, no matter how brain-damaged. By the end of the 1960's, Fortune Magazine wrote an article about how "A" & "B" students from good engineering schools didn't "fit in" very well at Ford, and that was OK by Ford. We know how the Japanese subsequently kicked Detroit's butt due to this attitude. It's probably time to come up with a new name for a new field. At MIT, the Media Lab tried to escape from the boredom of CS by moving down the street & working on new applications. Regardless of what you think about the Media Lab, they were at least trying to innovate. Fields become old well before they run out of problems, and usually well before many interesting problems are solved. One of the problems of the "linear era" in Electrical Engineering was the synthesis problem: how to synthesize a given linear system with passive components. This problem was never solved by mathematics at all, but by the invention of the "operational amplifier". And of course "delta-sigma" A/D's & D/A's (don't ask: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma-delta_modulation) & DSP's have completely replaced "op amps". When I entered MIT in the 1960's, no one in their right mind would go into electrical power engineering. Compared with computers, old-fashioned generators & motors were passe. Now, due to the interest in "green", people are once again becoming interested in power engineering. But this is _fifty_ years later! Perhaps Planck was right about more than physics when he said (approximately), "Physics progresses funeral by funeral". At least in a new field, there aren't tenured faculty around to constantly say "we worked on that problem 20/30/40 years ago", so the fun of inventing something "new" is still there. ---- From Rich: Neal Koblitz's article in the Notices, The Uneasy Relationship Between Mathematics and Cryptography is available, apparently free, at http://www.ams.org/notices/200708/tx070800972p.pdf I disagree with Neal on a number of points, but the article does discuss several interesting issues. ---- At 08:52 AM 9/9/2007, Thane Plambeck wrote:

Anyway: at the Stanford Computer Science Dept 40 year anniversary event last year, they had a panel discussion about the direction of computer science. Someone in the audience suggested that computer science needs more students, but that a growing perception that CS majors end up in dead-end programming jobs was working against that.

Response from a panelist: CS is not about programming, it's about ideas and creativity.

Response by questioner: Perhaps, but still, aren't students right that if you don't want to end up being a programmer, why choose CS? People get boring jobs writing programs to APIs defined by others---it's just a kind of primitive scripting and argument-passing job. It makes for a boring career.

I don't remember where it went from there, but I remember thinking, "well, that questioner is on to something...". There was a bit of a pall hanging over the room at that moment.

Then, Don Knuth got up from the audience, and said something to the effect of "It was suggested that Computer Science graduates are often writing programs to interfaces, and that's not fun, and I think that person is right...." [caveat --- this is not a quotation, but I pretty sure that's the spirit of what he said, and I welcome correction.]. "So," he went on, "how can we make it fun again? It's not as much fun as it used to be." [ quote approximate caveat, again]

I don't remember anyone giving a good answer to that