In claiming that computer science is out of touch and should become more interdisciplinary, Neil McBride makes inaccurate generalisations.
In fact, a significant proportion of research is in areas where computing interfaces with medicine, engineering and biology. This is not about supporting research in other disciplines by providing word processors and web interfaces, but, for example, about predicting where the protein-coding genes are in the genome or the automatic detection of faults in complex structures. There is a wide range of real-world problems in which the intellectually challenging bottlenecks are in computational modelling and these are in the curricula of many computer science departments.
Mahesan Niranjan.
Sheffield University