As an (aspirant) programming language theorist, we have a really great advantage in this field: advances in the field of prog lang have a natural distillation process: getting into a "real" programming language.
And it's great, it means I can toy with features and consider "what could I do if it was in a real language ?". Also, we can observe idioms and usage that gets developed when some advanced feature start being used by "normal" programmers.
Computer science, in general, does have the advantage that the distance to applications is quite often much shorter than math, which forces part of this distillation process to proceed a bit quicker.
On the other hand, the formalization is highly non-uniform, due to how young it is as a science.
And it's great, it means I can toy with features and consider "what could I do if it was in a real language ?". Also, we can observe idioms and usage that gets developed when some advanced feature start being used by "normal" programmers.
Computer science, in general, does have the advantage that the distance to applications is quite often much shorter than math, which forces part of this distillation process to proceed a bit quicker. On the other hand, the formalization is highly non-uniform, due to how young it is as a science.