No, but a surprising number of Computer Science degrees are mislabeled. Plenty of CS programs don't even require that their students take even a single class on computer science.
Probably because it's pedantic. At most schools, if you want to major in computer stuff, you major in some sort of computer science major. In some universities, it's in the engineering school. In others, it's associated with other science programs, math in particular. There are various historic reasons for this.
People who then go to build software systems are at least hopefully applying at least some engineering principles. Software arguably often doesn't follow as well-established engineering principles as some other types of engineering. But arguing there's some great separation between computer science and engineering really is pedantic.
Is it pedantic? I think Computer Science should be taught by Computer Scientists, which is a different set of people than Software Engineers. I say this AS a Software Engineer.
Every branch of engineering and science has more theoretical and more practical aspects. Look at physics. The people who do the theory and those who design the detectors have pretty different jobs.
And universities, at least the more elite ones, always tend toward the theoretical side in all fields. Which is mostly a good thing so long as it doesn't over-rotate. Whatever language you learn is probably going to be yesterday's news in 10 years. (Unless it's COBOL :-))
[And I say this as an engineer with degrees in non-SW fields.]
It is pedantic because at some schools the degree program for people whose intention is to write software in exchange for money is "computer science" while at other schools it's "software engineering" and at yet other schools it's almost certain to be something else. Which means that arguing about which is the theoretically "correct" term has no relevance, since the names are used so interchangeably by the schools themselves.
> At most schools, if you want to major in computer stuff, you major in some sort of computer science major.
That was definitely true in the 90s, but I don't think it's been the case for years now. Most schools have degrees like Information Systems where most of the people end up who are just generally interested in computers and/or find CS too difficult. Hell I work with a guy right now whose degree (from a state university) is in "computing" whatever that means.
In my opinion, it's just a low hanging fruit some people like to hit. It's pretty clear what the GP comment meant. Comments like that make HN worse (IMO) than the pun threads on the Juicero article earlier today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14771084).
