I can buy not calling mathematics a science (although I don't agree), but surely it's torturing language too much (in one direction or the other) to say that computer science is not a science?
If Mathematics is not a science, then the only one definition of it I know is that Mathematics is a language. Now is that not too much torture to the language by itself? That borders to a borderless recursion, which is supposed to be a part of Mathematics.
there's a humorous point: all "xxxxxx sciences" are /not/ sciences. compare political science, social science, computer science, earth science, with chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology. the real sciences don't need what ends up being a self-negating qualifier.
computer science isn't a science because it's a hodgepodge of algorithms and miscellanea, and very little theory-building.
> there's a humorous point: all "xxxxxx sciences" are /not/ sciences. compare political science, social science, computer science, earth science, with chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology. the real sciences don't need what ends up being a self-negating qualifier.
Certainly I see the humour in this humorous point, and in my most chauvinist moments as scientist (well, mathematician) might mutter it to myself, but I cannot agree with it as fact.
> computer science isn't a science because it's a hodgepodge of algorithms and miscellanea, and very little theory-building.
It sounds like you're discussing programming (which I think of as not yet a science—but I am no programmer), rather than computer science. There is certainly a rich theory behind computer science—indeed, there is a vein of computer science that is essentially just lightly 'applied' mathematics. Just see a random sampling of questions at http://cstheory.stackexchange.com if you don't believe it!
