The philosophy of computer science: Introduction to the special issue

Computer science has a significant role in the meta-activity associated with programming such as with the design and development of tools and methodologies that facilitate and aid the specification, development, implementation, and analysis of computing systems. The three caricaturing paradigms for computer science include the mathematical, the engineering, and the scientific. The first paradigm takes computer science to be a branch of mathematics, the second takes it to be a scientific discipline, and the last largely as an engineering endeavor that is stripped from any scientific and mathematical underpinnings. The semantics of programming languages also provides a new branch of the platonist/formalist debate. Every Turing computable function is also quantum computable and no quantum algorithm has been shown to compute a non-Turing computable function.