> The centrality of computing stems from the fact that it is a technology that has been changing the world for the past 80 years, ever since the British used early computing to change the tide of war in World War II.
I take issue with the idea hinted at here. Just like Algebra and other branches of mathematics were invented to deal with daily down-to-earth issues like accounting or farming, you'd be hard pressed to find a consensus that mathematics "aims to explain the real world".
The historical origin is very clear, but the train left the "real world" station pretty fast, "unreasonable effectiveness" notwithstanding. Am I to understand that because Enigma was broken using a physical machine, the field is bound to study physical reality? To me this feels as uncomfortable as to refer to astronomy as "telescope studies".
> I believe that thinking of TCS as a branch of mathematics is harmful to the discipline. [...] > Theories that fail at this “explain/predict” task would ultimately be discarded. Analogously, I’d argue that the role of TCS is to explain/predict real-life computing
Yeah, if you hired me to design harmful approaches, not in a year I would have come up with something as harmful as this.