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Descriptions

Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.

Are you here to participate in a specific proposal? Click on the proposal tag (with the dark outline) to see only posts about that proposal and not all of the others that are in progress. Tags are at the bottom of each post.

Comments on Computer Science

Post

Computer Science

Site Name

Computer Science

Description

The Computer Science (CS) community is a platform for computer science students, researchers, and anyone interested in computer science.

Topics

Topics covered would include topics in computer science that are closer to the theoretical front:

  • Formal languages: Automata theory, CFGs, Turing Machines, etc.
  • Data Structures.
  • Graphs.
  • Algorithms.
  • Reductions.
  • Computability and Complexity.
  • Optimization Problems.
  • Machine Learning.
  • ...

Exclusions

The following topics or types of posts would be out of scope:

  • Electrical Engineering.
  • Software Development.
  • Programming Languages.
  • Coding.
  • ...

Special Features

The ability to to write readable questions and answers:

  • The ability to write in LATEX.
  • The ability to quote something in the body of a question or answer: a quoting theme.
  • The ability to reference or cite links.
  • The ability to insert images.
  • (Not in SE?) (Optional) The ability to load drawing libraries (or any other libraries) in Latex, such as TiKZ.

Overlaps

As expected, computer science can have overlaps with the mathematics and software development communities. For example, many mathematical question are computer science driven, and vice versa. Also, some topics have both practical and theoretical fronts. For example, a coding question in machine learning can fit in CS (if it is an algorithmic question) or in software development (if it is more programming-language or coding driven), depending on the nature of the question. The nature of the question will decide where it fits better.

Note: I checked with possible overlaps with communities that survived the proposal stage.

History
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3 comment threads

Theoretical Comp.Sci. more suitable? (1 comment)
On-topic on Software Development CD (11 comments)
Casual browser (2 comments)
On-topic on Software Development CD

Every single one one of the listed on-topic examples except for machine learning (and perhaps graphs) are already on-topic on SD CD. We should strive to prevent overlap between sites, so you need to either argument why such an overlap is sought, or to move specific topics from the other sites, to this new site.

Andreas witnessed the end of the world today‭ wrote 11 months ago · edited 11 months ago

The Computer Science (CS) community is a platform for computer science students, researchers, and anyone interested in computer science.

I see no reason why it's not sufficient to let Software Development and Math cover this. I don't think we should have sites simply because there's a community for it, when we have sufficient (that is, full) coverage on our other sites. We shouldn't duplicate responsibility across sites.

Shamma‭ wrote 11 months ago · edited 11 months ago

Shortly, because they are different topics. Software development is about software design, programming, testing, architecture, and so on. Computer science community is more about theoretical computer science, it has nothing to do with software and programming languages. The former one is a "stack overflow" conterpart, and latter one is a "cs.stackexchange" counterpart.

I don't see why would someone ask about automata, polytime reductions, complexity classes, or proving the correctness of a graph traversal algorithm such as DFS/BFS, etc, in the software development or mathematics community. Well, of-course, there is some intersection between the computer-science and mathematics communities, but they are different, and it is easy to differentiate between the two in most cases.

Computer Science deserves a community on its own as its content is not covered by other existing communities.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote 11 months ago

The best way to test possible boundaries is to start asking questions in Incubator Q&A that would fit this proposal. I think there's overlap with Software Dev (and maybe Math), but if there's enough topic space for things that don't fit on those communities, that's something we can find out by testing. Sometimes a broad topic fits in more than one place and the differences emerge in how you ask the question.

Peter Taylor‭ wrote 11 months ago

All of those examples are in the intersection between mathematics and TCS, and I see questions about automata and complexity theory on sites like Math Overflow. (Proving the correctness of DFS/BFS would be closed there as not research rather than as not mathematics). math.codidact would welcome good questions about complexity theory, graph theory, etc.

Shamma‭ wrote 11 months ago · edited 11 months ago

I see your point, but the CS community exists, it is big and people there built their own community, for a good reason. The questions that you see in MO are usually old and are a small percentage of what is out there. The real question is when the CS community will be exposed to this site or when it will be convinced that this site is good for them. My intention was that opening a CS community here will encourage them to contribute also to this site. There is a good reason why a computer science degree is different than a math degree although one can argue that theoretical CS is math. Also, programmers are usually different people than computer scientists and they do different things.

Shamma‭ wrote 11 months ago · edited 11 months ago

Also, writing "all/most of the topics are covered by other communities" when it is clearly not, is not helpful. I encourage anyone, before stating such claims, to ask himself why such community exists successfully elsewhere. If a person from a well-known community (like me) is trying to open it in codidact, its because he is trying to help. Any cs person who finds cs.exchange (which is amazingly successful BTW) and sees no cs here, will go contribute there instead of the math site here, even if you welcome him. Its that simple. I think at this point, when codidact is small, attempts like mine should be encouraged. Give the idea a chance to grow, especially that it proved itself elsewhere, and lets ask questions in Incubator Q&A if we have any.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote 11 months ago

Please do ask questions in Incubator Q&A. I think concrete examples will help.

Well, I’m still not fully convinced a dedicated site is the right choice (I’m not a fan of excessive fragmentation). But, I agree, go ahead and post incubator Q/A for the site. All the good Q/A can be moved to other appropriate sites if the conclusion will be not to start a new CS site. Currently, Codidact doesn’t support moving stuff like that, but it’s on the todo list! (Somebody’s todo list, at least…)

Monica Cellio‭ wrote 11 months ago

Andreas witnessed the end of the world today‭ when we launch a community we'll need to move its questions from the incubator. If the conclusion of a proposal is to not create the community but move some incubator questions to other communities, that can be done the same way. We don't currently have a user interface for this, but someone can do it at the database if the need arises before the UI does. We want to help people build communities and get their questions answered, so let's go ahead and welcome CS questions in the incubator now and see how everyone's understanding evolves. Concrete cases will help us all.

Skipping 2 deleted comments.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote 3 months ago

Please use the incubator (CS Q&A) and Meta to further define these scope issues. Those are both more visible than this comment thread, and the whole point of the Proposals site is to help people work together to define and build communities. Thank you.