COMPUTER SCIENCE: “Anything which has to call itself a Science isn't”
When our discipline was newborn, there was the usual perplexity as to its proper name. We at Chapel Hill, following, I believe, Allen Newell and Herb Simon, settled on “computer science” as our department’s name. Now, with the benefit of three decades’ hindsight, I believe that to have been a mistake....
A folk adage of the academic profession says, “Anything which has to call itself a science isn’t.” By this criterion, physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy may be sciences; political science, military science, social science, and computer science are not. --Fred Brooks
Brooks, Fred (1996). "The computer scientist as toolsmith II". Communications of the ACM. Association for Computing Machinery. 39 (3): 61–68. DOI: 10.1145/227234.227243
Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. (1931–2022) was an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing development of IBM's System/360 family of mainframe computers and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about those experiences in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks
COMPUTER SCIENCE: “Anything which has to call itself a Science isn't”
When our discipline was newborn, there was the usual perplexity as to its proper name. We at Chapel Hill, following, I believe, Allen Newell and Herb Simon, settled on “computer science” as our department’s name. Now, with the benefit of three decades’ hindsight, I believe that to have been a mistake....
A folk adage of the academic profession says, “Anything which has to call itself a science isn’t.” By this criterion, physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy may be sciences; political science, military science, social science, and computer science are not. --Fred Brooks
Brooks, Fred (1996). "The computer scientist as toolsmith II". Communications of the ACM. Association for Computing Machinery. 39 (3): 61–68. DOI: 10.1145/227234.227243
Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. (1931–2022) was an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing development of IBM's System/360 family of mainframe computers and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about those experiences in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks