As a computer science professor, I have to say that this misreads the article. Oh sure, computer science, and especially certain subfields like software engine

As a computer science professor, I have to say that this misreads the article. Oh sure, computer science, and especially certain subfields like software engineering and languages, reinvent the wheel all the time. A new fad comes in and its proponents are too egotistical, or too lazy, to be bothered realizing it's the same as an old fad. This happens largely because the literature of computer science is exceptionally broad and not very deep. But this is hardly special to CS: it's common practice in engineering. More to the point, it doesn't have anything to do with what the author was on about. What the author was talking about is the tendency, in mathematics, for the entire field to become balkanized into small groups with little interdisciplinary crosstalk and a disturbing degree of inbreeding. Many departments consist of specialists who cannot, or will not, talk to one another about their work. Sometimes no one understands what anyone else is doing or talking about. That's the claim anyway, and I have no reason to doubt it from what I've seen myself. Computer science is nothing like this. Even computer science theory is highly interdisciplinary, application-oriented, and accessible to the mainstream CS audience (or at least to CS academics). In my department, I can talk to every single faculty member, reasonably intelligently, about what they are doing and how it is relevant to others. I can read their papers and more or less understand them. And I'm not some kind of uberprofessor, quite to the contrary. It's just that the field isn't very deep yet.