A State-of-Affairs in Computing Science

Joseph Sifakis, a Turing Award winner, writes in Cent. Eur. J. Comp. Sci., 1(1), pp 108-116, 2011:

Following beaten tracks rather than taking the risk of exploring new ideas
is a prevalent attitude of researchers in all scientific communities.
Research in Computer Science is not exempt from this syndrome

and:

A very common attitude is to work on mathematically clean theoretical frameworks no matter how relevant they can be.
Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize in Economics, says,

"... in the academic world the theories that are more likely to attract a devoted following
are those that best allow a clever
but not very original young man to demonstrate his cleverness."

Very often in Computer Science simple mathematical frameworks attract the most brilliant researchers
who produce sterile "low-level theory" that has no point of contact with real computing.
This leads to a separation between theoretical and practical work harmful for the discipline.