En el llibre Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, Donald E. Knuth ens explica per què els informàtics tenen un punt de vista específic, i com van aparèixer a mitjan segle vint.
Q: You've referred several times to a computer scientist's perspective. How do you distinguish that from other points of view?
A: I have kind of a radical idea about this, but I've had it for 30 years now and still haven't found anything wrong with it. Namely, suppose someone asks “Why did computer science jell so fast during the 60s, all of a sudden becoming a department at almost every university in the world?” I answer that the reason is not to be found in the fact that computers are so valuable tools. There's not a department of Electron Microscope at every university, although electron microscopes are great and valuable tools.
I'm convinced that computer science grew so fast and is so vital today because there are people all over the world who have a peculiar way of thinking, a certain way of structuring knowledge in their heads, a mentality that we now associate with a discipline of its own. This mentality isn't sharply focused, in the space of all possible ways of thinking; but it's different enough from other ways—from the mentalities of physicists and mathematicians that I spoke of earlier—that the people who had it in the old days were scattered among many different departments, more or less orphans in their universities. Then suddenly, when it turned down that their way of thinking correlated well with being able to make a computer do tricks, these people found each other.
I believe it was this way of thinking that brought computer scientists together into a single department, where they met other people who understood the same analogies, people who structured knowledge roughly the same way in their heads, people with whom they could have high-bandwidth communications. That's what I meant when I referred to a “computer science perspective”.
I didn't choose to be a computer scientist because my main mission in life was to advance computation. I chose computer science simply because I was good at it. For some reason, my peculiar way of thinking correlated well with computers. Moreover, I'm sure that people had this way of thinking hundreds of years ago; when I read old publications I think I can recognize the authors who would have been computer scientists if they had lived in the time of computers science departments. There was a time when physicists were called natural philosophers, and there was a time before chemists belonged to departments of chemistry. From considerations like this I believe that computer science will eventually take its place on essentially the same level as every other field of study, say 100 years from now; the fact that this mode of thinking never had a name until quite recently is just a historical accident.
One of the main characteristics of computer science is the ability to jump very quickly between levels of abstraction, between a low level and a high level, almost unconsciously. Another characteristic is that a computer scientist tends to be able to deal with nonuniform structures—case 1, case 2, case 3—while a mathematician will tend to want one unifying axiom that governs an entire system. This second aspect is sometimes a weakness of computer science: When we encounter a situation that can be explained by one axiom, we might still give it five, because five different rules are no sweat for us. But we're at our best in circumstances when no single principle suffices; then we can handle the discrepancies between different cases very nicely.
One of the first people to receive a Ph.D. in computer science was Renato Iturriaga de la Fuente, who graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1967. When I met him in Mexico City in 1976, he was head of the Mexican equivalent of our National Science Foundation. He told me then about his conviction that an ability to switch seamlessly between levels of abstraction and to deal fluently with nonuniform models helped him greatly to deal with scientists of many different backgrounds. In his job, he said, a computer scientist's way of thinking tended to be more effective than that of other scientists, even though he wasn't doing any computer programming or computer science research at the moment.
So that's what I think tends to be different about computer scientists. Experience shows that about one person in 50 has a computer scientist's way of looking at things.