Poll: Change the name of computer science to informatics? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Change the name of computer science to informatics?

2 pointsblintson12 comments

I think the name should be changed, since it's not dependent on experimentation, and largely has nothing to do with the physical implementation of computers.

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Since this is an opinion poll, it should have the "It doesn't matter" option. That's the one I'd go for.

At least at my school (U of Washington), CSE and Informatics are completely different programs. Our Info department is basically information science, web design, and watered-down programming. They are two distinct disciplines and should not become one.

Voted no and note if you call a mule a horse it will not make it so.

"Computer Science" encompasses fields that do depend on experimentation and are concerned with real implementations. There's more to Computer Science than theory.

Being concerned with real implementations largely falls under the category of engineering, and I have yet to hear a concrete example of depending on experimentation that doesn't amount to "we have to use the scientific method to make sense of shoddy, undocumented work by other programmers", which I have a hard time regarding as central to the field, even if regrettably necessary.

Computer systems are complex, and it's required to understand their performance behavior.

Computer Science is a ill-advised conflation of two different fields, of which one is largely an engineering discipline and one is essentially applied mathematics that the engineering side draws upon for tools and techniques. Neither is a "science" under any plausible definition of the word.

FWIW, that's how it is called in Italy (informatica).

no, and i think you're misunderstanding the meaning of "computer" in this context.

??? An algorithm that executes in O(n) time executes in O(n) whether the computer is silicon, DNA, mechanical, vacuum tubes, or whatever else you build a Turing machine in. I think "computer", to most people almost always refers to the physical implementation of a computer.

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=814632

Once parallelism enters the picture, our analysis must change. We have to weigh communication costs as well as computation costs, and sometimes we actually want to pick an algorithm which would, in a sequential world, be significantly slower.

In short, what "computer" you use can change how your analysis should proceed.

"it's not dependent on experimentation..."

therefore it should not be called science? Software development involves experimentation, testing, trial and error, measurement, standards, and it's much more rigorous than any science.

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