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Esprit d'escalier (link requires OED account), the French call it. It happens to us all. The phrase describes that annoying situation when you think of a retort when it is too late to use it. Sometimes you think of the retort only a few seconds too late, when the moment has passed; sometimes when you are lying in bed that night; sometimes, years afterwards.

When I was a first-year undergrad, I happened one day to be talking with a young philosophy student of my acquaintance. As an attempt at small talk, I asked her what sort of things she was learning about in her course.

She said airily that she didn't like to talk shop with non-philosophers, because it was such hard work.

“I know some philosophy,” I replied, in an attempt to find a middle ground.

“Oh, everyone says they know some philosophy, but that's not quite the same thing,” she countered, in a ‘how terribly tiresome’ tone that suggested that other people who had made that claim to her hadn't been reading Nietzsche at the time. As one who has always thought such academic name-dropping sounds at once unconvincing and self-aggrandizing, I kept shtoom on the matter, but my face must have betrayed my disapproval, for she explained her unwillingness: “I don't suppose you'd be as keen to talk about some obscure part of compsci with me.”

Actually, I would have been, and I said as much, because I am keen for greater public understanding of computer science. She didn't answer; to this day I don't know whether she thought such a discussion would be uninteresting, or whether she just lacked the courage to call my apparent bluff.

I was a first year then, and still considered myself a physicist rather than a compsci, and I had not yet understood the principles of conversation, nor learned to use the power of communication not only to carry information but to change states of mind. These have been my feeble excuses for the five years or so since that day, for even though I won the last word, I was unhappy with my answer: I let my acquaintance go away without having her world-view challenged, without bridging the rift between disciplines.

The answer is obvious in its simplicity; perhaps you have already seen it. Next time, when she says, “I don't suppose you'd be as keen to talk about some obscure part of compsci with me,” I will answer as follows: “Certainly I would. What would you like to discuss? Systems of logic and formal reasoning, perhaps, or the criteria for declaring an artificial intelligence to be alive, or semantics, or maybe Platonic realism and its relationship with type systems, or what it means to understand language.”

Computer science was born of philosophy, or the end of it that deals with symbolic logic, anyway. Even as the industrial, administrative, and scientific demand for computation and automation has meant that the practice of computer science now most commonly takes the form of engineering — getting things to work — new areas of research, such as language processing and computer vision, and the new relationships they bring, most significantly with cognitive scientists (who deal with the nature of the human mind), have meant that philosophers and computer scientists still have a lot to offer each other.