Harold Abelson says, “It might be engineering or it might be art. [...] It actually has a lot of common with magic. [...] It’s not really very much about computers, and it’s not about computers in the same sense that Physics is not really about particle accelerators and Biology is not really about microscopes and Petri dishes. And it’s not about computers in the same sense that Geometry is not really about using surveying instruments. In fact, there’s a lot of commonality between Computer Science and Geometry. Geometry, first of all, is another subject with a lousy name.”
So what is Computer Science about? It is about techniques for controlling the complexity of very large systems. For some reason, this made me think of J. R. R. Tolkien writing The Lord of the Rings.
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