Firstly "computer" used to mean the people that did computations, so, that untethers computation from the material doing those computations. And secondly, if you buy into the philosophy of it, computation is all around us, binds us in a way like the force in Star Wars.
> Firstly "computer" used to mean the people that did computations, so, that untethers computation from the material doing those computations.
But it is called computer science, who / whatever is doing the computation, not computation science, so I'm not sure that (either part of) your response applies.
Actually, I disagree with the grandparent (hence, I suppose, with Sterling) differently: I think that it's rather common to name sciences after gadgets, depending on how flexible you are about what is called 'science'. The first example that came to mind, just because I have a colleague who works on it, is cryo-electon microscopy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryo-electron_microscopy). It's fair to argue whether that's really a 'science' as opposed to just a 'technique', but I'm confident that there are other examples that are more clearly 'sciences'.
I disagree.
Firstly "computer" used to mean the people that did computations, so, that untethers computation from the material doing those computations. And secondly, if you buy into the philosophy of it, computation is all around us, binds us in a way like the force in Star Wars.