The long-running debate among some members of the (theoretical) computer science community about its publishing habits has heated up again, after Lance Fortnow’s column to appear in CACM arguing for a reform of the competitive conference system, Noam Nisan’s “opposing” view and many comments on both blogs. Central to the debate seems to be the concern on one side that CS is out of step with practice in other disciplines, while the other side seem to believe that through luck or design, the younger field of CS has hit upon a superior model to other disciplines.

CS is a strange field, a mixture of mathematics and engineering, crudely speaking. There has been ongoing debate over whether CS is a science or part of engineering, and the two camps in the conference argument seem influenced by those who think CS is a science and those who think it is isn’t. I certainly belong to the first, although sometimes my faith is shaken. But surely CS will eventually be recognized as a mature science with substantial links with other disciplines. These should lead to its exceptional publishing culture changing almost automatically.