Very interesting. I heard certain computer scientists claim that the field is in many respects more like a craft or an art than actual science.  I recently started dabbling with the language Scheme (a concise and intriguing Lisp dialect)  and the MIT school (the wizard book etc ….) it gave me many beautiful insights and ahas about computing concepts ….  And about Scheme’s  theoretical beauty and its  ramifications and influence on more popular programming  languages. I hope to become more proficient and maybe sometime use it as a tool in my research. However as a theoretical mathematician l’art pour l’art is also very satisfying for me. 

 It is a mix.  It is mostly math:  shannon entropy, complexity theory (P vs NP), etc.  But undoubtedly there is a lot of engineering (programming, algorithms).