Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>
> >From "Ubiquity", the IT magazine of the Association
> for Computing Machinery
>
> UBIQUITY: How much success do you think you've had
> advocating that computing is a science?
>
> DENNING: I find little argument with the claim that
> computing is engineering, but skepticism toward the
> claim that computing is science.
After Nixon's visit to China, a University of Chicago physicist (I forget his name & I've misplaced the magazine in which I read this) had an audience with Mao. One of the questions Mao asked was whether western physicists made a distinction between theory and thought. Though "maoists" in the west try to deny this, there was a serious epistemological and political point embodied in the phrase, "Marxism-Leninism-Mao Thought" -- a phrasing which (a) denied the right of the Comintern to dictate policy to the CPC and (b) denied the relevance of Mao's thought to other nations than China. Theory, in this distinction, is a radical abstraction from actuality, and for this reason (a) holds over local (temporal or spatial) differences and (b) cannot directly guide practice. I would myself correct the phrase, breaking it in two: Marxism-Lenin Thought and Marxism-Mao Thought. Lenin's works make more sense and are in fact more useful if you do not try to construe them as a general theory.
Whether or not this is a useful perspective on "science/engineering" I do not know, being pretty ignorant of both physical science and of engineering.
Carrol