Given where the NSF's funding is actually going, I chalk these statements up to a backlash against the trend of more people doing small amounts of programming a

Given where the NSF's funding is actually going, I chalk these statements up to a backlash against the trend of more people doing small amounts of programming as part of their "real" work. Scientists tend to view programming as more of a chore than an art, but it's still essential to getting real, relevant work done. It's clear to any of these researchers that a program just amplifies your own efforts. From a distance, it may appear that an academic rival is letting the computer do all the thinking. That just wouldn't be fair, would it? If the computer can't think, isn't it better to just publish great thoughts in raw form, and let some benighted industry worker do the calculations and data entry? Obviously, no. Thinking programmatically is different, and allows a researcher to answer new problems -- in any field. Even psychologists and sociologists crunch statistics on population groups: collecting and encoding data is tedious and time-consuming. Traditionally, surveys are filled out and crunched by hand; but looking at the massive amount of data available on social networks, for example, just crawling and aggregating that data could yield much better information than manually roping in 130 undergrads at your own school. Or you could splash a task out on Mechanical Turk to analyze the Turkers themselves. This would be big, and it would upset a lot of academics who built their reputations on traditional methods, and perhaps blew off computational research as a fad a decade or two ago.