this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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That's not at all true if you ask me. Computer science is the study of data and computation, on a theoretical level. Software engineering is not theoretical at all, but very practical.
Here’s the thing…all of computer science is based on the practical, and software engineering is based on the theoretical
The data and computation being studied? We made it up. We don’t need to do it any particular way, we’re playing with ideas to interface to computers. Computers we made up too
Software engineering is using the lessons we learned by studying how others did things and how it works out in practice
We teach students computer science to make them into software engineers. You can still study how things are done as a separate career, but the two ideas are like an ouroboros. It’s a cycle of creation and analysis
I don't understand this at all. Computer science is based on theoretical foundations that were developed way before any actual computer existed. This goes back more than 100 years.
That's only true if you studied a very practically-oriented education. Such educations are usually called "Software engineering" rather than "Computer Science".
As a computer science graduate myself, my university definitely did not try to make me into a software engineer. It was very theoretical, with a clear focus on further research if that was what you wanted to pursue. You could get through the education quite okay and only ever write very little actual code. It was the maths that was the harder part to write.
Yes, it's code. We studied and iterated on that code long before the first computer, we came up with architectures that influenced the creation of the hardware to run it
The way they teach it has probably changed since I went through, but we had software engineering as a concentration. I actually picked networking and just took the all the software engineering courses because it had less math requirement lol
But it was mostly theoretical, with hands on homework to demonstrate it in practice. Everyone had certain courses they had to take, like at least 3 semesters of programming, discrete math, data structures, and a few others along with gen eds.
You just had to get a certain amounts of credits from different levels, so you could go through and pick what you wanted to focus on. You could dive into more theoretical or practical, high level or low level, but everyone had to study the full stack enough to understand it at a basic level
But it's all castles made of sand. Even before the first computer, we've been iterating on these ideas... Studying them and building higher
The line between the science and engineering is blurry...Hell, our jobs are blurry and usually cross-discipline