I agree to a certain extent. All sciences specialize as they mature. Computer scientists looking to make their mark are inevitably driven out from the core into security, bioinformatics, robotics, data mining, distributed systems, what have you.
I don't know Knuth's mind exactly, but it seems to me he decided to set up shop at the core, at theory and algorithms, to set the science on a solid foundation going forward. So it's fundamental algorithms, arithmetic, searching, sorting, and lately graphs and combinations.
There are enough people writing in their specialties, and there will always be incentives to go baroque and novel. That's how we get stupid stuff like my thesis, or 8% faster neural network training, or the paper on implementing a Turing machine in C++ templates.
It takes a special kind of person to forge ahead slowly, for decades, on the field-defining work that he does. The other kinds of scientists (and software engineers, for that matter) are all too easy to find.
I don't know Knuth's mind exactly, but it seems to me he decided to set up shop at the core, at theory and algorithms, to set the science on a solid foundation going forward. So it's fundamental algorithms, arithmetic, searching, sorting, and lately graphs and combinations.
There are enough people writing in their specialties, and there will always be incentives to go baroque and novel. That's how we get stupid stuff like my thesis, or 8% faster neural network training, or the paper on implementing a Turing machine in C++ templates.
http://ubiety.uwaterloo.ca/~tveldhui/papers/2003/turing.pdf
It takes a special kind of person to forge ahead slowly, for decades, on the field-defining work that he does. The other kinds of scientists (and software engineers, for that matter) are all too easy to find.
http://edward.oconnor.cx/2002/04/don-knuth-sells-out