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Ask HN: What are lesser known / taught subfields of Computer Science?

7 points| entha_saava | 5 years ago

5 comments

order

giantg2|5 years ago

Stenography comes to mind. It seems it just gets mentioned in cryptography classes. Not sure that's very useful though.

I think machine learning is not taught enough relative to it's growing demand.

COBOL is a language that is still used in many places and will need people to replace those who are retiring, so I feel that is lesser known and not taught in many places.

diehunde|5 years ago

Some I can think of:

- Automata theory

- Complexity theory (P vs NP stuff, not the one from leetcode problems)

- Verification

- Optimization using stuff like genetic algorithms, ant-colony algorithms, particle swarm, simulated annealing, etc. Not sure how to call that area. In my case it was an AI course.

- Fuzzy logic

- Scientific computing and Numerical analysis (CFD, finite elements, etc)

- Information theory

kingkongjaffa|5 years ago

> - Scientific computing and Numerical analysis (CFD, finite elements, etc)

Yes please, if we could have more software engineers working on mechanical/aeronautical/civil/<physical> engineering tools that would be great.

Currently the state of the art takes a long time to get out of PHDs and into industry, and when it does it is in the hands of a few companies that sell expensive software licenses.

The likes of at Ansys, Siemens (NX), CD-adapco,

You can access FOSS tools like open-foam but the average engineer doesn't have the skillset to also wrangle the tool as well as their domain problem.

An area I was always fascinated with but never had chance to dig into it was topology optimization to generate structures (or flow paths) to accomodate some given boundaries and physics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology_optimization

RNeff|5 years ago

Program verification. How to design and implement correct programs.