Tricky question. One answer would be to ask whether there is an intrinsic difference between "computer science" and (say) physics? Or are the differences just that computing is where science was in the Middle Ages?
To me it seems like "computer science" lumps together too many different goals. It's like if we had a field called "word science" that covered story-writing, linguistics, scientific publication, typesetting, etc.
But certainly we have to take back the term "computer science" and try to give it real meaning as to what might constitute an actual science here. As Herb Simon pointed out, it's a "science of the artificial", meaning that it is a study of what can be made and what has been made.
Science tries to understand phenomena by making models and assessing their powers. Nature provides phenomena, but so do engineers e.g. by making a bridge in any way they can. Like most things in early engineering, bridge-lore was put in "cookbooks of practice". After science got invented, scientist-engineers could use existing bridges as phenomena to be studied, and now develop models/theories of bridges. This got very powerful rather recently (the Tacoma Narrows bridge went down just a few months after I was born!).
When the first Turing Award winner -- Al Perlis -- was asked in the 60s "What is Computer Science?", he said "It is the science of processes!". He meant all processes including those on computers, but also in Biology, society, etc.
His idea was that computing formed a wonderful facility for making better models of pretty much everything, especially dynamic things (which everything actually is), and that it was also the kind of thing that could really be understood much better by using it to make models of itself.
Today, we could still take this as a starting place for "getting 'Computer Science' back from where it was banished".
In any case, this point of view is very different from engineering. A fun thing in any "science of the artificial" is that you have to make artifacts for both phenomena and models.
(And just to confuse things here, note how much engineering practice is really required to make a good theory in a science!)
Today's "computer science" is much more like "library science" than it should be on the one hand, and too much coincident with engineering on the other (and usually not great engineering at that).
It's way past time for our not-quite-a-field to grow up more in important ways.
So, given I don't study it or read on it, I'm actually curious if you or anyone else has references on where information theory impacts real software development over the years. I study lots of formal methods & synthesis research but never even see the phrase mentioned. I've been imagining it's in its own little field working at a strongly theoretical level making abstract or concrete observations about computers. Just don't see them outside some cryptography stuff I've read.
EDIT to add example below where Bertrand Meyer presents a Theory of Programs that ties it all to basic, set theory.
https://bertrandmeyer.com/2015/07/06/new-paper-theory-of-pro...