Perhaps one day "computer science" will, like Yugoslavia, get broken up into its component
parts. That might be a good thing. Especially if it meant independence for my native land, hacking.
Bundling all these different types of work together in one department may be convenient
administratively, but it's confusing intellectually. That's the other reason I don't like the name
"computer science." Arguably the people in the middle are doing something like an experimental
science. But the people at either end, the hackers and the mathematicians, are not actually
doing science.
The mathematicians don't seem bothered by this. They happily set to work proving theorems
like the other mathematicians over in the math department, and probably soon stop noticing
that the building they work in says "computer science" on the outside. But for the hackers
this label is a problem. If what they're doing is called science, it makes them feel they ought
to be acting scientific. So instead of doing what they really want to do, which is to design
beautiful software, hackers in universities and research labs feel they ought to be writing
research papers.
In the best case, the papers are just a formality. Hackers write cool software, and then write
a paper about it, and the paper becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the
software. But often this mismatch causes problems. It's easy to drift away from building
beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers.