This is a nice essay.<p>However, the page does not seem to be intended to be linked to directly, as it is missing some vital context. In particular, the author is apparently Douglas E. Comer, a professor of computer science at Purdue. I can't tell when it was written, but it does mention the iPhone, so it's not too awfully old.<p>-----<p>One paragraph in the essay worries me a bit.<p>> Discard the idea that “thinking about computing” in the abstract is somehow more prestigious than “thinking about novel ways to design and build computing systems”.<p>Strictly speaking, I agree, but I get the sense from the rest of that paragraph that he wants to take things too far: that his solution to the mathematicians vs. engineers face-off is "let the engineers win". But I think that a great strength of C.S. is the short path we have from theory to practice. We can take crazy-abstract stuff like category-theoretic-based typing or the number theory behind modern encryption, and design production systems based on them.<p>So, yes, he is right that, if we didn't have the engineers, then none of the wonderful computing stuff out there would exist. But if we didn't have the mathematicians, then so many subfields (encryption, authentication, compression, typing, optimization, compiler design, search ranking, ...) would be dead in the water. We'd be tossing around raw bitmaps using tweaked versions of Fortran IV, and hoping fervently that no one intercepts our network packets. (Or, more likely, something even worse.) Let's acknowledge that we need both kinds of people.