Ilya Lipovsky (lipovsky@cs.bu.edu) on 2/20/08 wrote:
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>Thanks. I actually didn't read it thoroughly. What can I say... I presume, someone
>who "translated" simply took the term as it's used in Russian and matched it to
>the one used in English. This merely shows that informatics/informatika/computer
>science can be used interchangeably, which can be viewed as once again stressing my original point.

Strictly speaking, it showed that "informatika" and "computer science" can be used interchangeably, but "informatics" is slightly different, stressing my original point. :-) Note that many schools in English-speaking countries use terms like "Computer Science and Informatics" in their titles.

I don't actually like "informatics" as a description of computer science because it puts too much stress on "information" rather than "computation"; if we weren't allowed to use "computer science" for some reason I'd prefer "computation science" or "computational theory". ("Computermatics"?) I'm also not a huge fan of the "bioinformatics" term, which is where I was first introduced to the name "informatics" in any form (it isn't common here at all). It just sounds to much like it came out of a marketing firm.