Does Computer Science still exist?

Summary

Does Computer Science Still Exist? I have always seen the computer as a tool that gives us new ways to think. Does it still? As I write this, Hack, the text-based dungeon crawler from my childhood, has just been fully ported to JavaScript by an AI agent. I handed the agent the old PDP code and told it to go. When I checked after a couple hours to ask why it was taking so long, it replied: it was working, and that thirteen of twenty-three test sessions were already passing parity. It continued its coding process without interruption all night, and eventually expanded its work to 202 passing tests, achieving near 100% coverage with verified parity to the original. While I slept it was doing real work: debugging, reasoning, fixing genuine bugs. Not instant. Yet almost entirely on its own.... Brian Harvey's Computer Club students in 1982, when they created Hack I grew up in Wayland, the next town over from Sudbury, Massachusetts, where a group of kids at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School wrote this game called Hack in 1982. They had Atari 800s and LOGO and an obsession with a Unix game called Rogue that most of them had only heard about. I had the same computers and the same obsession. I never saw Rogue either, but I remember a dungeon exploration game called Zork: the white house, the mailbox, the underground empire. If you look at the Hack source code, there is a little bit of Zork in it. On those machines, you could press ctrl-C in the middle of a game and find yourself staring at the code that made it run. Every file, every line, right there. It is hard to recapture that sense of wonder today. I was eleven years old. I did not know that I was inside a revolution. The computer revolution is a continuous thread from the 1940s to today. I was born in 1970, right in the middle of it, and I have spent my whole life on that thread: LOGO, then BASIC, then C, then graduate school, then a career in software, then a pivot to research, and now I run a lab that studies the i...