Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/2447976.2447988
Viewpoint
the science in
Computer science
Computer sCienCe has for de- cades been ripped by an old saw: Any field that calls itself a science, cannot be science. The implied criticisms that
we lack substance or hawk dubious
results have been repeatedly refuted.
And yet the criticism keeps coming up
in contexts that matter to us.
It comes up in education in the debates about encouraging more student
involvement in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Many critics see computer science
mainly as technology or math. Will
computer science be excluded because
it is not seen as genuine science?
IllustratIon by gra Ph Icgeoff/ shutterstock.com
It comes up in research in debates
about the predictive power of our analytic tools. In some subfields, such as
storage management, performance
prediction, and algorithms, experimental methods have led to reliable
predictive models. In others, such as
system safety and security, we lack
predictive models and we can only
speculate that experimental methods
will lead to understanding. In his first
ACM president’s letter, Vint Cerf asks
why software engineering does not
rely more on experimental science
(Communications, Oct. 2012). In so doing, he echoes a lament uncovered in
a 1995 study of software engineering
literature. 10 Do enough of us know the
experimental methods needed to do
this consistently well?
In interdisciplinary collaboration, it
comes up when teams are formed and
when credit is handed out. Why are
computer scientists still often seen as
professional coders rather than genuine collaborators?
My purpose here is to review the history of the question, “Is computing science?” and point to new answers that
can help educators, researchers, and
collaborators.
I use the term “computing” to refer
to the set of related fields that deal with
computation. These include computer
science, computational science, infor-
mation science, computer engineering,
and software engineering. Interesting-
ly, I have encountered less skepticism
to the claim that “computing is science”
than to “computer science is science.”
a Short history of Science
in Computing
Computing has been deeply involved
in science since the beginning. A science vision pervaded the field through
the 1950s, and then faded as technology development drew most of our energy through the 1980s. A science renaissance began in the 1990s, propelled by