Is Computer Science a permanent discipline?

This is a question that has often been asked and one to which I have given much thought since taking my first class in computer science while I was in high school in 1973. In those days, computer science was largely programming, and to a great extent, my entire education in computer science focused on programming. I developed an understanding an understanding of computer science as a discipline much later as I increasingly used computers in my research.

Computer Science is a relatively young discipline. The first degree program appears to have been in 1951 at Cambridge University, the first courses may have been a few years earlier at Columbia University and the first department of Computer Science appears to have been founded at Purdue in 1962. No disciplines are truly permanent; Classics was a key discipline in the nineteenth century, it was quickly eclipsed by English in the twentieth, but today English departments have long been in decline with science, engineering, and technology dominating the current university. Many of the words that we use in these fields that we think to be old were in fact introduced recently by William Whewell, who served as the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, between 1841 and 1866. Whewell (pronounced Hew-ell) is the source of many of the words used by many scientists. His neologisms include, scientist, physicist, linguistics, electrode, dielectric and a host of others - many of which we think to be ancient are of recent origin. Much of the terminology related to science and its practice is relatively recent, but even if it weren’t it is a mistake to consider any discipline to be permanent. The divisions and departments of today largely date from the nineteenth century, and, as many of us realize, much of the interesting work of today takes place at the boundaries between disciplines, so much so that the boundaries between disciplines are becoming increasingly blurred. It is likely that our current siloes will disappear overtime as they increasingly overlap.

Computer science largely developed in three kinds of departments: mathematics, physics and electrical engineering. It wasn’t always clear that it wouldn’t be reabsorbed into one of these departments. Many of us considered computers to be tools and made comments like “computing will become a part of most disciplines - while today we have to go to computer labs, we don’t have to go to pencil labs.” Thinking like this led people to believe that computer science could disappear like the classes in cursive hand-writing have largely disappeared. While it is true that we don’t have to go down the hall to the computer lab anymore, instead of disappearing, computer science has become one of the largest and most important departments at many universities.

While today we are familiar with people and concepts from the pre-history of computer science (e.g Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, difference engines, and analytical engines, many people consider computer science to have been born in 1936 in a paper entitled On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem by Alan Turing which was published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. It was in this paper that the Turing machine made its first appearance - it is widely regarded as the singular root of computer science from which everything else has grown.

In its early years, computer science was dominated by the growth of its technologies - but at the same time it was becoming a discipline in it own right with its own ways of addressing and solving problems. Fields like deep learning and artificial intelligence broadening the discipline and at the same time revolutionizing the methodologies used in adjacent disciplines. And, indeed like physics before it, computer science is now giving birth to new fields with data science being one of the latest.

So while disciplines will continue to emerge and evolve and departmental boundaries will shift, at this point we can safely say that computer science has as much claim to be a permanent discipline as does any other. It may well be the most important discipline of the current era.