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Comment by agent00f | Hacker News Reader

> Controversies like these make me glad I work in the field of programming...while arguments over what algorithm or frameworks work best are less sexy than what the sciences cover, at least with narrow claims, it's easier to concretely argue for one or the other

Yeah, it's pretty ironic when the field with (Comp) Science in the name isn't really a science but math.

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It is a science. A formal science. Same as math and logic, for example.

Hal Abelson disagrees with you. "Computer Science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, its not a science. It might engineering, or it might be art. But we'll actually see that computer -- so-called science -- actually has a lot in common with magic."[1]

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQLUPjefuWA

Add to that list Fred Brooks (IBM System/360, Brooks' Law): http://www.cs.unc.edu/~brooks/Toolsmith-CACM.pdf

Relevant quote: "... the scientist builds in order to study; the engineer studies in order to build. ... I submit that by any reasonable criterion the discipline we call 'computer science' is in fact not a science but a synthetic, an engineering, discipline. We are concerned with making things, be they computers, algorithms, or software systems."

Robert Sedgewick would disagree with Hal Abelson.

Just because some people tend to use pure maths to analyze the run-time of algorithms, doesn't mean we can't apply the scientific method to the problem. Here's a nice presentation by Sedgewick where he shows how we can apply the scientific method to programming: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rs/talks/ScienceCS10.pdf

And quote:

> Algorithm designer who does not experiment gets lost in abstraction

> Software developer who ignores cost risks catastrophic consequences

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