Geometry, first of all, is another subject with a lousy name. For the name comes from gaia, meaning the Earth, and metro- meaning ‘to measure.’ Geometry originally meant measuring Earth, or surveying.And the reason for that was that thousands of years ago, the Egyptian priesthood developed the rudiment of geometry in order to figure out how to restore the boundaries of fields that were destroyed by the annual flood of the Nile. And to the Egyptians who did that, Geometry really was the use of surveying instruments.
Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason the Egyptians thought Geometry was about surveying instruments, and that is, when some field is just getting started and you don’t really understand it very well, it’s very easy to confuse the essence of what you’re doing with the tools that you use. And indeed, on some absolute scale of things we probably know less about the essence of Computer Science than the ancient Egyptians really knew about Geometry.
Well what do I mean by the “essence” of Computer Science, what do I mean by the “essence” of Geometry? See it’s certainly true that these Egyptians went off and used surveying instruments, but when we look back on them after a couple of thousand years, we say gee, what they were doing, the important stuff they were doing, was begin to formalize notions about space and time, to start a way of talking about mathematical truths formally. That led to the axiomatic method, that led to sortof all of modern mathematics… Figuring out a way to talk precisely about so-called “declarative knowledge,” “What is true.”
Well similarly, I think in the future, people will look back and say yes, those primitives in the 20th century were fiddling around with these gadgets called computers, but really what they were doing was starting to learn how to formalize intuitions about “process,” how to do things. Starting to develop a way to talk precisely about “how-to” knowledge as opposed to Geometry, which talks about “what is true.”
Hal Abelson in the first video lecture of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
