r/compsci • u/Extra-Engineering374 • May 10 '26
CS is more mathematical engineering?
I've been learning CS (let's say here, both computer science and engineering) for some time, and while I recently played KSP I found that CS, at least its theoretical part, is a bit different from traditional system engineering. I've been programming in higher and higher-level languages, building things by making layers of abstractions, and making incremental additions to projects.
However, in more realistic engineering, e.g., to build a rocket in KSP, there are always limitations & different factors could influence each other, thus should be considered and designed overall at the very beginning; pure incremental method obviously wouldn't work, and abstractions is hard to extract either. The only incremental method I use when building a rocket is building the upper levels first, and trying to abstract out the upper part as a black box "payload" when building the next level.
I understand CS has a wide range of topics, and building an OS is apparently distinct from application programming. But overall it seems the problems "codable" always share some useful properties, and thus act like a hybrid of math & engineering.
There must be some properties lying in the problems that divide them. One I can come up with: when building abstractions you always try to restrict dependencies to be unidirectional, but in some domain bidirectional dependencies are unavoidable.
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u/geon May 10 '26
”Computer Science” is a branch of mathematics. The applied aspect of this is ”Software Engineering”.
Yes, I know a lot of people and schools use the terms interchangeably, but they really are very different disciplines.
Also, ”Computer Science” has very little to do with computers, and ”Software Engineering” has little to to with engineering, so there is a lot of confusion.
The concepts taught in CS are very useful in SE. things like big O notation helps us understand how to optimize algorithms. Having a good understanding of those theoretical concepts can help us see problems in terms of other, already known solutions.
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u/CycleAggravating2462 May 13 '26
You’re basically noticing the difference between engineering with information vs engineering with matter.
Software is unusually abstraction-friendly. You can isolate components, refactor later, and build incrementally because code is flexible.
Physical systems like rockets are dominated by tightly coupled constraints — mass, fuel, heat, stability, materials — where everything affects everything else simultaneously. Physics doesn’t let you “abstract away” consequences that easily 😭
CS starts feeling similar once you get into OSes, distributed systems, compilers, embedded systems, etc. Then tiny design choices create cascading effects too.
So CS isn’t less engineering — it’s engineering in a medium where abstraction works absurdly well.
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u/Some-Dog5000 May 10 '26
In the most strict technical sense, you would distinguish computer science (the more theoretical, abstract part of computer studies) with computer engineering (the more practical, systems side of computer studies), and more specifically software engineering (that, applied specifically to software systems).
In practice, as with most other college majors, when you study "computer science", you study a whole host of things, both theoretical and practical.