Chomsky revolutionized linguistics in the 1960s. Compiler theory incorporates a huge amount of his work. Calling his contributions negligible or detrimental is like saying Freud's contributions were the same.
Could you elaborate on Freud? I thought the general consensus was that none of his "theories" were accurate and evidence doesn't support or it directly contradicts his ideas. From the admittedly little I've read, it comes off as just "making stuff up" and generating frameworks that can explain anything (hence nothing). Psychoanalysis certainly has no place in modern psychology.
Or are you saying that Freud, despite being entirely wrong, got things moving and eventually helped folks to start taking psychology as a serious science? Or another point I am not understanding?
I am not the grandparent author, but I think your last paragraph describes it well.
Yes looking back Freud's theories are bogus. However, that is only looking back and taking in consideration what has happened after. However, whatever happened after in the theory of how mind and human psychology was very much influenced by Freud. A lot of it was a reaction but it was still a reaction to something. Those that came after studied Freud and it was their background.
To say it another way, it hard to predict what would have happened if Freud was not there. We could have been in a worse shape maybe today.
CogSci PhD student here, I'm no fan of Chomsky but I'd still say his contributions were a lot more useful than Freud's. Freudian Psychology is mostly abandoned by practitioners at this point; the Chomsky hierarchy is still canon in CS.
The Chomsky hierarchy while being but a small part of his work is undoubtedly a useful technical contribution, but I don't see it as particularly relevant for cognition and linguistics. As an example, for cognition memory constraints seem to be much more fundamental than the type of formal rules. It is also rather arbitrary: many kinds of formal languages don't fit into his hierarchy, there are many other ways to carve up the space of possible languages/grammars.
I think that his general linguistic theories might share the same fate as Freud's theories: large, complex theories for which there is simply not much empirical support, making it difficult for people to continue to work on them without their originator imbuing them with his authority.
Though you have to wonder how much of that is a lack of interest in research. PCRE has been shown to not fit his hierarchy, they are more than regular but less than context-free.
