computational thinking

Peter J. Denning, Neville Holmes

This e-mail interview with Peter Denning sprang from comments in the October 2010 The Profession column, “The Future of the Computing Profession: Readers’ E-mails” about Denning’s essay, “The Great Principles of Computing” (American Scientist, Sept./Oct. 2010, pp. 369-372).

Computing has its own paradigm, distinct from engineering or science.

To view the relationship between computing and science as a one-way street is mostly untrue today, argues Ian Foster, and will be even less true by 2020.

A growing number of sciences, from atmospheric modelling to genomics, would not exist in their current form if it were not for computers. A simplistic analysis of this relationship focuses on hardware, and sees science as largely a passive beneficiary of the computing industry's relentless innovation, acquiring and applying to its own ends the fastest computers, largest disks and most capable sequencing machines. In this view, science and computing (as an intellectual discipline) have little to say to each other: it is the computer industry that drives the advances that have an impact on science.

The article discusses what the study of informatics entails. At is essence, informatics is concerned with how people, information, and technology interact. University informatics programs are thus interdisciplinary in nature. Along with computer science, an informatics student may study any of a variety of subjects including statistics, sociology, and biology. In the baccalaureate informatics program at Indiana University Bloomington, computer programming comes last in a series of topics, rather than first. The University of Michigan has a doctoral program in informatics.