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It's technically not even a science. It's in the realm of logic and maths. After all we don't call algebra a science, why does computing all of sudden need the word? So to some it all up: computer science is neither about computers nor is it a science.
So what the hell is CS about ?
You count the number of "swap" operations in insertion sort, quicksort, or merge sort. You count the number of "memory" operations. You count the number of bytes used.
When precise counts are difficult, you learn big-O notation to estimate how counts change as variable grow. Etc. etc. etc.
> I've never liked the term "computer science." The main reason I don't like it is that there's no such thing. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia. At one end you have people who are really mathematicians, but call what they're doing computer science so they can get DARPA grants. In the middle you have people working on something like the natural history of computers-- studying the behavior of algorithms for routing data through networks, for example. And then at the other extreme you have the hackers, who are trying to write interesting software, and for whom computers are just a medium of expression, as concrete is for architects or paint for painters. It's as if mathematicians, physicists, and architects all had to be in the same department.
English is not my primary language so correct me if I’m wrong. But didn’t the word "computer" have another meaning before the physical computer machine? Otherwise I would agree it should be renamed to information science.
But even so, it would better be called “computation science”.
It is called “informatica” in Dutch, in any case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(job_description)
Naming it after a profession doesn't mitigate the critique from Sterling's quote. Mathematics isn't named calculator science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EA-eVWEIKY
Also, people arguably use the scientific method when programming. I think that Sedgewick illustrates this point well in Algorithms: https://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/14analysis/
For my entire time as an undergraduate, the large top-ten research university I attended offered no courses in programming language theory, nor were these topics woven into the computing curriculum at large. (actually, there may have been a handful of graduate courses, but undergrads were strictly prohibited from joining -- there was a mandatory theory of computation class required for all CS majors, but the topics v…
Computer Science ~ physicists
Computer Engineering ~ electrical engineers
Computer Technician ~ electricians