If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice.
But yeah, in general I hate how people treat theory, acting as if it has no economic value. Certainly both matter, no one is denying that. But there's a strong bias against theory and I'm not sure why. Let's ask ourselves, what is the economic impact of Calculus? What about just the work of Leibniz or Newton? I'm pretty confident that that's significantly north of billions of dollars a year. And we what... want to do less of this type of impactful work? It seems a handful of examples far covers any wasted money on research that has failed (or "failed").
The problem I see with our field, which leads to a lot of hype, is the belief that everything is simple. This just creates "yes men" and people who do not think. Which I think ends up with people hearing "no" when someone is just acting as an engineer. The job of an engineer is to problem solve. That means you have to identify problems! Identifying them and presenting solutions is not "no", it is "yes". But for some reason it is interpreted as "no".
> see for example, the wide array of names for basic functional data structure primitives like map, fold, etc. that abound across languages
Don't get me started... but if a PL person goes on a rant here, just know, yes, I upvoted you ;)
[0] You can probably tell I came to CS from "outside". I have a PhD in CS (ML) but undergrad was Physics. I liked experimental physics because I came to the same conclusion as Knuth: Theory and practice drive one another.
The problem I see with our field, which leads to a lot of hype, is the belief that everything is simple. This just creates "yes men" and people who do not think. Which I think ends up with people hearing "no" when someone is just acting as an engineer. The job of an engineer is to problem solve. That means you have to identify problems! Identifying them and presenting solutions is not "no", it is "yes". But for some reason it is interpreted as "no".
Don't get me started... but if a PL person goes on a rant here, just know, yes, I upvoted you ;)[0] You can probably tell I came to CS from "outside". I have a PhD in CS (ML) but undergrad was Physics. I liked experimental physics because I came to the same conclusion as Knuth: Theory and practice drive one another.