I strongly disagree with the author's position. I think it betrays bias in favor of computer science as opposed to software engineering. The stereotypical compu

I strongly disagree with the author's position. I think it betrays bias in favor of computer science as opposed to software engineering. The stereotypical computer scientist operates in a an abstracted world. The physical limitations of computing only stands in the way of perfection. The stereotypical software engineer delights in maintaining real-world systems. The imperfect messiness of the world---its onslaught on all things man-made presents a beautiful challenge in itself. I'll give you an example. A colleague of mine was stuck debugging a fairly complicated piece of Python Pandas data sciency code. In trying to help him, I realized he does not understand the difference between absolute and relative paths. In fact, I don't think he understood what a file is. Now, you can say such details are bullshit. Who needs to know about paths? They should just work. I want to do data science, not poke around some arcane legacy operating system standards. I am an artist and a mathematician, dang it! Yet the greatest generation of computer scientists and software engineers always did both. People like Donald Knuth and Brian Kernighan made their own "bullshit" which continues to run our machines. For me, to encounter that history is to understand the delicate compromise between theory and practice. To become a great architect, one cannot bypass gaining intimate knowledge of building materials. We are lucky that our systems contain the trace of their history. We should study it closely, instead of calling it bullshit. Without that history, our students and our colleagues are bound to play with prefabricated toys, while the true polymaths write their own compilers and operating systems.