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Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

> Computers are still imperative

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." — (Mis)attributed to Edsger Dijkstra, 1970.

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> As a result, primarily in the U.S., the topic became prematurely known as "computer science"---which actually is like referring to surgery as "knife science"---and it was firmly implanted in people's minds that computing science is about machines and their peripheral equipment.

Edsger W Dijkstra. Mathematicians and computing scientists: The cultural gap. Abacus, 4(4): 26–31, June 1987. ISSN 0724-6722. URL http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=25596.25598.

Which is similar in spirit to the contested quote, and predates by a few years any of the references on Wikiquote.

In the SICP lectures, they explain why names like 'Computer Science' come into being.

They explain it by explaining the origins of the word 'Geometry', which translates to 'Earth Measurement'. What they deduce is when a field is young, its hard to make a distinction between the science behind the field and instruments/tools you spend time with to make the science happen. That is because you spend so much time with the tools that the big part of the work is tool expertise itself.

Until we arrive at the perfect computers and perfect languages, we are going to be stuck with this sort of a phenomenon for a very long time.

We had the perfect term early on: informatics

It is also the official term for computer science in many cultures. Mostly in European countries/languages.

That explains why astronomers are so incredibly enthousiastic about telescopes, and spend immense amounts of time trying to create better ones to overcome the limits of what they can do now.

Sure, everyone is enthusiastic about their tools. Still, it is not telescopes that are the subject of the science of astronomy.

It's not the subject, no, but the limitations on telescopes are what places limits on how much astronomy can do, and by improving their telescopes, and by improving how they use their telescopes, they can find out more than what they could before.

Note that the detection of gravitational waves necessitated the modelisation of these waves first. So astronomy is needed as an input and also progress as an output of the telescope..

Meanwhile, in the real world...

I'm still convinced that (Mis)Quoting Dijkstra Considered Harmful. A Dijkstra quote derails a conversation about CS almost as surely as anything else.

Developing computer programs is not computer science, either. The application of science to solve practical problems is "engineering".

Unfortunately, real programs run on real computers and engineers need to deal with that. In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

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