[lbo-talk] Computing R&D: science or enginering?

[ravi]

On 7 Jun, 2007, at 10:26 AM, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>> From "Ubiquity", the IT magazine of the Association
> for Computing Machinery
>
> BIQUITY: 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. In the past few years
> there has been a sea change on the science claim. The
> skeptics are coming around.

I am a skeptic and I am not coming around yet ;-). The reasons in my  
case are quite different.

There is a healthy tradition of considering mathematics as both  
empirical and as a science. IMHO, only naive notions of  
verificationism underwrite the opposite belief. Now that I have got  
that out of the way, the next step in pointing out the obvious is  
that the foundations of computer science, quite correctly referred to  
as "computing" above, were mostly laid out before the arrival of  
computers, in the mathematics of computational theory and recursive  
functions.

The reason why I remain sceptical about CS as science is that the  
practice of it is quite unlike anything else that passes for science.  
In other words, Computing Science is quite a bit detached from  
Computer Science. There is of course a whole other bag of tricks  
under the rubric "information theory". I won't touch on that.

	--ravi