"John Munson, a software engineer and professor of computer science at the University of Idaho, is not quite so generous. 'Cave art,' he says. 'It's primitive. We supposedly teach computer science. There's no science here at all.'"

I'll give him his clever phrase, despite being technically false. What we create with our knowledge of computer science (our programming) is not the same thing as computer science itself.

This is an interesting way to think about programming, though. Compare it, for instance, to metalworking. The craft itself, clearly, is distinct from the science of metallurgy, but at the same time they have evolved alongside each other. I wonder if programming and computer science will go through a similar progression. As metalworkers just were learning to manipulate metal, we bit-twiddled and hand-assembled; as metalworkers evolved their tools and meticulously forged their creations, we created compilers but still hand-coded our programs. The next big step in metalworking was the automation of their craft via factories; is this way code will go as well? Will we simply guide computers as they produce their own code? And what advances in computer science would be necessary for this to happen?

Edit: Please forgive me if my history of metalworking is slightly incorrect, I just realized I mostly pulled it out of my ass.