David Parnas, taking a cue from the relationship between other engineering and science disciplines, has claimed that the principal focus of computer science is studying the properties of computation in general, while the principal focus of software engineering is the design of specific computations to achieve practical goals, making the two separate but complementary disciplines.
David Parnas从其它工程和科学学科之间的关系得到启示，宣称计算机科学的主要重点总的来说是研究计算的性质，而软件工程的主要重点是具体的计算设计，以达到实用的目的，这样便构成了两个独立但又互补的学科。