Does Computer Science Need Computers?

The pioneering computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, winner of the 1972 A.M. Turing Award and inventor of one of the most iconic algorithms in all of computing, was nothing if not opinionated. Certain programming languages drew his ire, for example: He once dubbed Fortran “the infantile disorder” and stated that “the use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.” In justifying his disdain for using computers in his own work, he wrote, “Medical researchers are not required to suffer from the diseases they investigate.” I first encountered Dijkstra’s hot takes nearly four years ago, not long after I joined Quanta as a staff writer covering computer science.

The subject was new to me — I’d been a physics journalist, and before that a physicist — and I soon learned that most people don’t know how to interpret “computer science writer.” In the broader public discourse, computer science is practically synonymous with programming or coding, but at Quanta we cover the less understood theoretical side of the field. Then I stumbled on my favorite of the many memorable declarations attributed to Dijkstra: Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. This analogy, it turns out, may not have originated with Dijkstra, but he probably would have endorsed the sentiment.

For me, the quote offered a pithy, provocative way to distinguish my reporting from tech journalism. And I can’t deny that it was flattering: The field I cover, it suggested, is about something deep and timeless and beyond mere technological innovation. I got into the habit of invoking the analogy regularly — including in an episode of The Quanta Podcast — but I also began to have second thoughts about it, for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate.

Was I just feeling guilty about an implicit dig at my former colleagues who build telescopes, or was the analogy missing something important? I decided to try to get to the bottom of this. Is computer science about computers?

And if not, what exactly is it about? I was wading into a very old debate. Researchers began developing a mathematical theory of computation in the 1930s.

Engineers built the first general-purpose electronic computers in the 1940s. Computer science emerged as a distinct academic discipline in the following decades, when the research traditions of math and engineering came together, and arguments about the nature of the new field soon followed. In 1967, the prominent computer scientists Allen Newell, Alan Perlis, and Herbert Simon staked out their position in a spirited letter to the editor in the journal Science.