[electronvolt]

I'm fairly certain it's this, given the history of CS and programming. It started as a branch of mathematics. As an academic field, even in the 1980s/1990s and in some places today, it was/is taught as a branch of math. And comparatively, programming/operating computers was not high prestige and was seen more as grunt work.

Interestingly, in some ways the people in Bell Labs were right: the mathematics is what objectively /lasts/. Consider: how much mathematics from the 1950s is still in use and relevant, versus how much written code is still in use and relevant? Mathematics (and algorithms, etc.) have a permanency to them that simply written programs don't.

[RickHull]

> Consider: how much mathematics from the 1950s is still in use and relevant, versus how much written code is still in use and relevant?

This is the wrong question. CS isn't hardly about code. Most of our CS today is from before the 1950s.

[electronvolt]

You're correct that CS isn't about code. Programming is, and that's what I was drawing the comparison with.

Most of the CS we have from pre-1950 is fundamentally mathematics: algorithms, theory of computation, etc.