Conference proceedings vs articles in Computer Science

It came as a surprise to me that in Computer Science conference proceedings are more prestigious than peer-reviewed articles (see comments to this post). Furthermore, people never publish papers in journals, considering those to be a waste of time.

This is an opposite of what is going on in physics/chemistry/biology, so I asked Daniel Lemire on twitter whether that is true. Daniel explained to me that before the on-line era, the publication cycle was way too long for such a fast-developing field like Computer Science. Therefore journals traditionally don't have so much authority as conference proceedings, which are much faster for science communication.

Phil Anderson on computations

Here is a quote from a Nobel Lecture of famous condensed-matter theorist Phil Anderson:

"...Very often such, a simplified model throws more light on the real workings of nature than any number of “ab initio” calculations of individual situations, which even where correct often contain so much detail as to conceal rather than reveal reality. It can be a disadvantage rather than an advantage to be able to compute or to measure too accurately, since often what one measures or computes is irrelevant in terms of mechanism. After all, the perfect computation simply reproduces Nature, does not explain her."

While Anderson gave his lecture in 1977, this seems to be even more relevant nowadays.

Another theorist, Phil Bunker, while giving talks, often describes somebody's work as "...these guys with small brains and big computers!"