I think this article is highly unfair to computer scientists:

- Computer science is about extending our understanding what can be done with computers (including what can be done efficiently). The computer scientist in this story exactly does that: he sees that the usage of the poster is a special case of a much more general pattern, and tries to understand this pattern, so that a solution that is developed for the general case can be applied to all of them, without having to develop a novel solution for every new case, which can save an insane amount of money.

- The kind of requirement analysis, and process orientation is rather untypical for computer scientists, but rather for what is called in German "Wirtschaftsinformatiker" (i.e. people who are business process analysts first and programmers second). These are people who are deep in love with such analysis paralysis, not the typical programmer or computer scientist who is often quite suspicious of such concepts.

In other words: if your toilet is clogged, you call a plumber, and not an expert in fluid dynamics.

It is, but maybe he had Dijkstra as a professor.

I think the point is that yes, of course telescopes are important to astronomers, but they're not the essence, they're not what the study is about. They are the tools of the study, not the object of the study.

The same can be said about computers and computer science. I don't think I fully agree with that, but it's interesting to think about.

It varies. I used to work for a Physics and Astronomy department, yes, some of them are interested in telescopes, of various sorts, and indeed that's the department running the scheme where lay people can look at interesting stuff in the sky using a mid-size optical telescope. But, there's a lot of deep physics, that's why it's a physics department. At scale some of the physical properties from everyday life we usually don't notice stop being negligible and because we're small that scale is called astronomy.

For example if you have a whole bunch of Hydrogen the gravity its exerting on itself is negligible... Unless it's a lot of Hydrogen because eventually instead of being negligible the gravity adds up to where the Hydrogen atoms undergo nuclear fusion and that's how you get stars.

Similarly, Oceanography does have boats and a large building next to the sea, but although some of them are capable sailors, a lot of what they're interested in is theoretical and doesn't require you to even be able to smell the sea, let alone go out on it.

Using telescopes doesn't make them professional telescope makers. You can be a perfectly good astronomer just by using telescopes built and maintained by other people, and you can be a perfectly good telescope manufacturer without publishing peer-reviewed astronomy papers.