"Chomsky contributed to linguistics and it was an interesting theory but it turned out he was mostly wrong..." You've made a very strong claim about linguistic

"Chomsky contributed to linguistics and it was an interesting theory but it turned out he was mostly wrong..." You've made a very strong claim about linguistic theory while knowing very little about it. The vast majority of those working on phonology do so within the mold set by Chomsky & Morris Halle in 1970, and there are roughly zero syntacticians doing serious work on natural language syntax outside the Chomskyan tradition (whether in GB or Minimalism). "The religion built around Chomsky is a bit crazy." You're hardly in a position to judge, with no more than a passing acquaintance with psych 101 summaries of his work. "Just because you defined something doesn't mean it's impressive." The Chomsky hierarchy was not "defined" in the deflationary sense that you're pushing. Chomsky discovered that generative mechanisms partake of a special set of related properties relating the range of their output to specific constraints on the formalisms that can exactly describe their grammars. It so happens that this discovery made possible much that happened in CS during the 60s and into the 70s. I'll leave aside your bizarre comments as to the unimpressiveness of Peano arithmetic.