Computer science... differs from physics in that it is not actually a — Computer science

"During the last years of the 1950s, the terminology in the field of computing was discussed in the Communications of the ACM, and a number of terms for the practitioners of the field of computing were suggested: turingineer, turologist, flowcharts-man, applied meta-mathematician, applied epistemologist, comptologist, hypologist, and computologist. The corresponding names of the discipline were, for instance, comptology, hypology, and computology. Later Peter Naur suggested the terms datalogy, datamatics, and datamaton for the names of the field, its practitioners, and the machine, and recently George McKee suggested the term computics. None of these terms stuck..."

"The only generally agreed upon definition of mathematics is "Mathematics is what mathematicians do." which is followed by "Mathematicians are people who do mathematics." What is true about defining mathematics is also true about many other fields: there is often no clear, sharp definition of the field. In the face of this difficulty [of defining "computer science"] many people, including myself at times, feel that we should ignore the discussion and get on with doing it. But as George Forsythe points out so well in a recent article*, it does matter what people in Washington D.C. think computer science is. According to him, they tend to feel that it is a part of applied mathematics and therefore turn to the mathematicians for advice in the granting of funds. And it is not greatly different elsewhere; in both industry and the universities you can often still see traces of where computing first started, whether in electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, or even business. Evidently the picture which people have of a subject can significantly affect its subsequent development. Therefore, although we cannot hope to settle the question definitively, we need frequently to examine and to air our views on what our subject is and should become."

"[Computers] are developing so rapidly that even computer scientists cannot keep up with them. It must be bewildering to most mathematicians and engineers... In spite of the diversity of the applications, the methods of attacking the difficult problems with computers show a great unity, and the name of Computer Sciences is being attached to the discipline as it emerges. It must be understood, however, that this is still a young field whose structure is still nebulous. The student will find a great many more problems than answers."

"Computer science research is different from these more traditional disciplines. Philosophically it differs from the physical sciences because it seeks not to discover, explain, or exploit the natural world, but instead to study the properties of machines of human creation. In this it is analogous to mathematics, and indeed the "science" part of computer science is, for the most part mathematical in spirit. But an inevitable aspect of computer science is the creation of computer programs: objects that, though intangible, are subject to commercial exchange."

"If biology limited women’s ability to code, then the ratio of women to men in programming ought to be similar in other countries. It isn’t. In India, roughly 40 percent of the students studying computer science and related fields are women. This is despite even greater barriers to becoming a female coder there; India has such rigid gender roles that female college students often have an 8 p.m. curfew, meaning they can’t work late in the computer lab, as the social scientist Roli Varma learned when she studied them in 2015. The Indian women had one big cultural advantage over their American peers, though: They were far more likely to be encouraged by their parents to go into the field, Varma says. What’s more, the women regarded coding as a safer job because it kept them indoors, lessening their exposure to street-level sexual harassment. It was, in other words, considered normal in India that women would code. The picture has been similar in Malaysia, where in 2001 — precisely when the share of American women in computer science had slid into a trough — women represented 52 percent of the undergraduate computer-science majors and 39 percent of the Ph.D. candidates at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur."

"The percentage of women working in computer science-related professions has declined since the 1990s, dropping from 35% to 26% between 1990 and 2013. According to the American Association of University Women, we can reverse this trend by removing negative connotations around women in computer science. Educators and parents must work together to help girls maintain their confidence and curiosity in STEM subjects. Professional women already in the field can become mentors, while men can help create a more inclusive workplace."