"An experiment is a procedure carried out to verify, refute, or establish the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. Experiments vary greatly in goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results."
I have done a lot of performance work in my career, and there you run experiments almost continuously. At least you do if you actually want to have an effect. Admittedly, many people try to optimize without running experiments. That tends to not be very effective.
And yes, computer systems are easily sufficiently complex that reasoning it out ahead of time without running the experiment tends to be completely futile except for the most trivial arrangements. In fact, even in some situations that seem completely trivial.
> I am going to buy milk -- it's an experiment to see what happens.
If you have a hypothesis and you're trying to find out if it is true or not, sure, that can be an experiment. Usually it probably won't be.
> I am drinking coffee in the morning, it's an experiment to see if it will still keep me awake.
That certainly can be an experiment, for example if you vary the amount of coffee to see how much of will be keep you awake. Though it seems unlikely that you will be isolating the variables sufficiently. With computers, isolating the variables is often a lot simpler.
> By that token we've diluted the word science to not really mean anything anymore.
See you are proving my own point. Just because you do exploratory stuff and run "experiments" that doesn't make what you science. What isn't science then?
> I have done a lot of performance work in my career, and there you run experiments almost continuously
Yes me too. But I am not a scientist like Einstein.
There is a stretch in going from I am debugging some program and trying various things to saying I am a scientist.
You can sure call yourself a scientist but you have to explore why you want to do that. Is to make yourself feel better because the word "programmer" is boring or implies a lower status. What about craftsman, you are" crafting software" is that imply something undesirable, if so why? What about business problem solver?
Licensed engineers even scoff at software "engineers" even calling themselves "engineers" (even though what most computer scientist do is kind of like engineering), because they don't have a license etc.
Wow. Just wow. Please don't project your insecurities on others.
Look, I tend to say that "Computer Science" is a bit pretentious, "playing with computers" is overall more appropriate for the level our field is at. Not sure where you got Einstein from. And, in the words of Wolfgang Pauli: "Ach, that isn't even wrong".
Bringing Einstein, who was a theorist, into a discussion about experiments is downright silly, and makes me question whether you have any idea as to what you're talking about.
Second, assuming for the sake of argument that Einstein was an experimenter, it would be just about the biggest straw-man imaginable. If experiments are only experiments if performed by one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, then science effectively doesn't exist and there are no scientists, to several significant figures.
However, the question was not who is an awesome scientist, but whether there are experiments in CS, whether empiricism is relevant especially vs. the entire field being a trivial application of mathematical theory.
And that is, for me, easy to answer: it is a highly empirical field. If you think it is a trivial application of mathematical theory, you don't know what you're talking about, neither in theory nor in practice.
And yes: there is a lot of science being done that isn't at the level of Einstein or the people at CERN or Fermilab.
And you do experiments in many fields!
"An experiment is a procedure carried out to verify, refute, or establish the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. Experiments vary greatly in goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiment
Particularly debugging, if you aren't completely random, usually takes on the form of repeated experiments.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DebuggingAndTheScientificMethod
I have done a lot of performance work in my career, and there you run experiments almost continuously. At least you do if you actually want to have an effect. Admittedly, many people try to optimize without running experiments. That tends to not be very effective.
And yes, computer systems are easily sufficiently complex that reasoning it out ahead of time without running the experiment tends to be completely futile except for the most trivial arrangements. In fact, even in some situations that seem completely trivial.
> I am going to buy milk -- it's an experiment to see what happens.
If you have a hypothesis and you're trying to find out if it is true or not, sure, that can be an experiment. Usually it probably won't be.
> I am drinking coffee in the morning, it's an experiment to see if it will still keep me awake.
That certainly can be an experiment, for example if you vary the amount of coffee to see how much of will be keep you awake. Though it seems unlikely that you will be isolating the variables sufficiently. With computers, isolating the variables is often a lot simpler.
> By that token we've diluted the word science to not really mean anything anymore.
Going with your straw-men: probably.