I was not arguing that programming is all there is to Computer Science (which is why I said I understood the point Dijkstra was making with his astronomy quote).  However, I disagree with the notion that programming is "a very small subset" of Computer Science -- even though I think Dijkstra would probably agree with you on that.  I think programming is a <i>large</i> subset of Computer Science.  Yeah, there's a lot more to it than that, but in my book the practical side of things is more important than Dijkstra seemed to think it was.<p>He was obviously brilliant and very perceptive with regard to many things in the field.  However I still think it is over the top that the guy didn't even own a computer.<p>There are many who would rather spend their careers just writing applications without ever analyzing the differences between two algorithms, much less ever studying or thinking about computation in general.  Then there are those who would spend their careers strictly on theoretical endeavors, and do not wish to continue writing applications or software systems of significant value.  It is my personal opinion that the best Computer Scientists are the ones that regularly do both.