[jacobolus]

Did you try reading the article? This bit from Knuth is a fun contrast to your comment:

> Alas, people these days rarely measure a computer scientist by standards of beauty and interest; they measure us by dollars or by applications rather than by contributions to knowledge, even though contributions to knowledge are the necessary ingredient to make previously unthinkable applications possible.

[amichail]

Try getting a grant proposal or publishing a paper on a novel application without a proper scientific evaluation.

Imagine for example how you would evaluate twitter in a scientific way.

[jacobolus]

Let’s take Twitter as an example then.

The only reason that Twitter is possible, at any kind of scale, is because decades of research have been put into the algorithms that route messages inside big computer systems. Do you remember that first year or two of Twitter when it was the laughing stock of the internet for its constant interruptions and crashes? Well, eventually they had enough money to hire someone who was familiar with the latest CS research, and could actually make the thing keep up with their user base. That's not considering all of the further decades of effort put into all of the implemented infrastructure on which modern computers and networks run, into compilers, kernels, network stacks, security, etc. etc. And of course the computer software prerequisites to Twitter are just the tip of the iceberg, the whole thing built on that marvelous edifice of millennia of scientific and mathematical investigations.

I'm told Twitter is neat (I really have no interest in using it myself).... but it’s both utterly dependent on Science, and also not that scientifically interesting, as an idea. (Topics related to Twitter might be interesting; for instance, the social networks could be interesting for sociologists, the use by dissidents might be interesting for political scientists, the details of the network stack might be interesting to computer scientists, etc.)

[ams6110]

What's with the twitter fixation? I've benefitted from Knuth's work for over 20 years (as a practitioner, not an academic). Twitter? To me it's a curiosity at best; I've never used it.

[moe]

Seconded. Just the idea of mentioning twitter in this context inflicts almost physical pain on me.

Knuth is regarded by many as an Einstein-like figure in Computer Science. How that remotely relates to a web-company is beyond me.

[wglb]

Twitter has very little to do with science. Donald Knuth produces science.