As i understand it, Science is basically making sense of nature and natural laws/phenomenons. Way is it called computer science even though humans literally invented the machine and (as a species) know everything there is to know about it?
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There are different kinds of science. What you described is the natural sciences – physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and such. There are also social sciences – archeology, economics, linguistics and such, and formal sciences, namely mathematics.
Computer science is a branch of math. It involves analyzing computer programs from a mathematical perspective, like algorithms, computation and information theory.
Computer science actually predates physical computers – it’s closer to a field of math, focusing on what can be computed in theory regardless of what computing devices actually exist. Ada Lovelace, for example, lived in the early 1800s and is regarded as the first computer programmer for her work designing algorithms for a hypothetical Analytical Engine that didn’t physically exist.
That is why computer science is different from computer engineering, but for why it’s called a science is mostly about the definition of science. We could say that science is about physical experimentation, but that would mean many non-experimental research fields like anthropology are excluded. It’s generally taken that a science is a field with a rigorous approach to expanding knowledge, and so computer science fits.
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Fun fact: In portuguese it is actually called information engineering. But i dont know which of the two is less accurate. we are now dwelving in to quantum computing which we dont know everything about, and even within “normal” computers we broke moore’s law because we started running into quantum level issues we cant solve (yet).
The term computer is literal.
It is a device that computes data, normally math.
So computer science isn’t the science of the modern device is known as personal computers but is rather the science of computing itself.
It is a bit oddly named. Generally speaking, Computer Science is a theoretical field. It’s not about computers, but about computation.
In some languages it is named after data instead or information, which makes it a bit clearer. It’s the science of data and the processing of data. Computers are just a helpful tool which can make our computations go faster.
In the old days computer engineering was all about building computers – the hardware side of things.
When I started, my job was known as “programmer”, which over time became “software developer” and finally “software engineer”, with the last being the silliest title because software is rarely an engineering discipline.
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