When a teacher invests time to master a scientific area (such as geometry,
algebra, electromagnetism or organic chemistry) s/he can be certain that
what was mastered will always be useful in teaching the subject. But this
is not true for those who invest in mastering software. A teacher investing
a year or two in learning PASCAL or JAVA or WebCT may loose the mental
investment when somebody decideds not to support the product.
Something similar may happen in certain areas of engineering (for example
a change from the tube-based to the semiconductor-based electronics) but it is
never so drastic and so devastating as in the area of software. That is why I
think that the so-called "computer science" is not really science. What is it?
Ludwik Kowalski