Why is Computer Science Still Called Computer Science?

[Monster92]

Many people within the field say it's not a science nor a subject to do with computers. Then why keep it with the name computer science. What's stopping them from changing the darn name?

 

[pallidin]

What would you call it?

 

[DavidSnider]

In what way is it not a science?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Many people within the field say it's not a science nor a subject to do with computers.

Show us these people.

 

[DavidSnider]

When you say it's not a subject to do with computers I assume you are referring to when Edsger Dijkstra said , "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes".

I think he was just trying to say that it's an abstract enough field where using some physical implementation of a computer isn't necessary to study it. Like most other sciences things are made simpler by removing irrelevant details and assuming a general case.

 

[phinds]

Many people within the field say it's not a science nor a subject to do with computers. Then why keep it with the name computer science. What's stopping them from changing the darn name?

Computers have two aspects, hardware and software. You can't meaningfully or usefully have one without the other.

I think it would be possible to have a long and complex set of courses is computer science that has nothing to do directly with hardware or one focused on hardware without reference to software (but that would be harder if the courses were all to be helpful in some way) but you have to talk about one or the other. In what way then would the courses not be about computers?

True, study of advanced algorithms often has more to do with advanced math than directly with programming but it is the intellectual underpinning of advanced programming.

I think the people who make such a statement, if there are any, have it wrong.

 

[Jocko Homo]

Many people within the field say it's not a science nor a subject to do with computers. Then why keep it with the name computer science. What's stopping them from changing the darn name?

There's really no point in changing the name...

Computer science is literally the study of computation. Today, practical computation is done using machines called "computers" so we call the study of computation "computer science." What's so bad about this that requires changing? Your efforts would be better spent convincing the world to switch from π to τ...

 

[Jocko Homo]

Many people within the field say it's not a science nor a subject to do with computers.

Show us these people.

As David Snider has pointed out, Edsger Dijkstra had said that computer science is not really about the computers...

It has been such a long time ago that I can't be sure but I think Richard Trefler was my Logic and Computation professor at the University of Waterloo. In any case, that professor in the first day of that class described computer science as being "a strange amalgam of mathematics, science and engineering," and that it wasn't exactly anyone of those three.

So, in all fairness to the original poster, there are distinguished experts in this field who do claim what pdffile is saying...

 

[Ivan92]

Show us these people.

For one pddfile sent us this link through the chat yesterday.

http://www.cosmolearning.com/video-lectures/overview-and-introduction-to-lisp/