[maxhallinan]

Computer science is a specific treatment of these topics that is based in formalism. Compare John McCarthy's "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I" and Paul Graham's "The Roots of Lisp". These papers cover exactly the same material. But only the first is computer science because it uses a formal language to express the ideas.

[adjkant]

If that's the definition of CS we're using then my original post is a very egregious misnomer. I feel like that definition is way too restrictive though. CS can be formalized and informal, but both are still CS IMO.