I originally broached this topic in Why does the URL for this Stack Exchange use "scicomp," but the title says "Computational Science"?. Long story short, if we absolutely had to change the name, I'd change it to "Scientific Computing & Computational Science". I'd rather not change the name unless there was an outcry of disapproval over the current site name.
Right now, the main good things about our site name is that it accurately reflects the intended scope of the site, and it's short (2 words). However, it has several disadvantages:
- Cognitive dissonance: the site is "Computational Science", so people sometimes call us "CompSci"
- Similarity to Computer Science: we are never going to get "compsci" for a URL, ever
- Dyslexic URL: we're SciComp, not "CompSci"
- Common two-letter short-hand: CS is also used by Cognitive Science and Computer Science
We could switch to "Scientific Computing", which would solve all of those problems, but then, as Deathbreath correctly points out, the site name wouldn't accurately encapsulate our intended scope, thus creating a big new problem. For people in the know, "Scientific Computing" has fundamentally different connotations than "Computational Science".
The least worrisome problem is length of site name, which is why I'd rather have "Scientific Computing & Computational Science", even though it's five (four-and-a-half?) words, and that's only if there's a real outcry to change the name. Yes, I know scientific computing is a subset of computational science, but the fact is, we can't start our name with "computational science" and dodge the problems I outlined above. It's a kludge, but it's the best kludge I can come up with if the naming thing becomes so much of a problem that we have to change it.