system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What are Chomsky's main contributions, philosophically and otherwise, and how are they holding up with time?

Is it worth investing time into reading Chomsky? And if so, what are the highlights in his books and papers that are worth checking out? 

I myself am studying cognitive psych and Chomsky was introduced as being the one that wrote the definitive critique of behaviourism and helped found the cognitive era, and I've seen a lot of his political commentary, but I'd like to know more about the bigger picture of his career and where he stands to contemporary studies in psych, linguistics, philosophy etc.
gpt
I can speak to some of the "otherwise." It gets overshadowed by his later work, but Chomsky's early work in computational linguistics is very important in computer science. Chomsky identified four classes of formal grammars and showed how each corresponded to a particular class of language and type of automaton (regular languages ⇔ finite state automata, context-free languages ⇔ pushdown automata, context-sensitive languages ⇔ linear-bounded automata, and recursively enumerable languages ⇔ Turing machines), and showed that these grammars formed a hierarchy of strictly increasing power.