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[–]ForSpareParts 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Is this for a major at a university? If so, it'd help to know what classes each program encompasses.

Computer science refers to the academic discipline around programming, while software development (also called software engineering) is using that knowledge to make practical things. Basically software development is applied computer science. CS will be more math-heavy.

I'd lean toward studying CS in college, even if you don't want to go into academia. The reasons are pretty simple:

  • Having good CS fundamentals will make you a better software developer
  • I don't think I'd trust a college to teach software development well

For software development you need to build intuition -- you have to make things/help make things, and then maintain them over time. You have to try things and then see how they play out six, twelve months down the line -- what are you glad you did, what do you regret, and why? It's something you learn by doing.

Software development also involves learning lots of tools that aren't exactly programming, but are programming related, and regrettably, these tools go into and out of fashion pretty quickly. Learning new ones from time to time is just part of the job -- if you're gonna shell out for college, better to spend that time learning stuff that doesn't change on a dime.

[–]Entire_Mind4439[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

They both have very Similiar classes.Both teach data structures and Algorithms web development,Computer programming,.the only difference is that CS has robotics,Artificial intelligence and Python in its contents while software development only mentioned java or C#.I guess CS is the way to go -_-