Peter Thiel is fond of claiming, “when people use [the term] science, it’s a tell that something isn’t a science–like political science or climate science or computer science…”
Others have dug into the etymology of our dear field… perhaps out of a morbid fascination? That devilish Dutchman Dijkstra in EWD 924 explains:
Usually these [Departments of Computer Science] were little more than ill-considered cocktails of locally available disciplines (and semi-disciplines) that had some connection with automatic computing: electronic engineering, communication and switching theory, business administration, numerical analysis, numerical control, library science, artificial intelligence and the like, in short, such an incoherent bunch of disciplines that the resulting cocktail hardly appealed to the intellectually discerning palate. These premature departments were concerned with construction of the various possible application areas of computers…
And so Dijkstra argues for (and stubbornly uses) a slightly different name for the field, Computing Science:
This discipline, which became known as Computing Science, emerged only when people started to look for what be common to the use of any computer in any application. By this abstraction, computing science immediately and clearly divorced itself from electronic engineering: the computing scientist could not care less about the specific technology that might be used to realize machines, be it electronics, optics, pneumatics, or magic. At the same stroke, computing science separated itself from all the specific problems of embedding computers meaningfully in some segment of some society —concerns that, societies being as different as they are, are almost unavoidably parochial—.
But Dijkstra is not alone; Hal Abelson in his first of the famous SICP lectures begins the series with the proclamation that:
Computer science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, it’s not a science.
In fact, it seems to be more alchemical than scientific:
… [computer science] actually has a lot in common with magic.
As to his why, well, you’ll just have to watch his lectures… Going further:
It’s also not really very much about computers. And it’s not about computers in the sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not really about microscopes and petri dishes.
Dijkstra also happens to use a similar analogy; mentioned first in a memorium for him:
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
and a commemoration:
In fact, he objected even to the term “Computer Science”. He likened this to naming Astronomy as “Telescope Science”, defining a science by its instruments rather than by the area of its search for truth.
And so to respond to Thiel, unlike the other two maligned fields, perhaps this is just an error in naming? At least for the time being? After all, that is one of the two hard things in Computer Science.