The Cultural Roots of Informatics

apparently paradoxical situation in which, while computers are pervading our everyday lives, Computer Science is facing a deep crisis in the U.S. [1]. They attribute it to “ … our collective failure as educators, researchers, and practitioners to articulate a cogent, compelling narrative about the science of computing (as opposed to just the technology) ” and blame the reduction of the field to programming and possibly its heterogeneous nature among the causes of the demotivation of young students in enrolling in Computer Sciences curricula and of a reduction in research funding. This situation is not new and not peculiar to the U.S.. The large public- and the press articles are a testimony- tends on one side to look at computers as a mere mixture of technologies, obtained by wiring together quite a lot of circuits and writing silly (and mostly buggy) programs in some esoteric language, and on the other one to credit Informatics with the merit of inventing brand-new methodologies to solve any kind of problems, while the merit is often just to bring to the rationale and formalise some mechanisms which were already present in other disciplines, but in a latent, pragmatic form. Therefore, while in [1] the author stress the benefits of integrating Computer Science with othe