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name 5 Software Engineering Breakthroughs in the last 10 years

 
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I was just interviewing John Guttag (Head of MIT's EE/CS Dept). Among other things, he suggested that's its harder to identify break throughs in software engineering, as opposed to computer science. He asked me to name 5 major break throughs in the last 10 years.
I started to name some, but then we got in debates about when the break through occured. Design Patterns for example, were first decribes in the 90's, but concepts like MVC have been around since the 70's. Is unit testing a breakthrough, or common sense? When did it become common? OOP has been around since the 60's, but its wasn't until the mid to late 80's that it was commonly used.
I'd like to hear what others consider recent major software engineering breakthroughs.

--Mark
 
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Being around and break through are 2 different things. By break through is it meant totally new and inovative or coming into wide usage?
 
Mark Herschberg
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Well, that's one of the harder issues. It's not clear when something happens. In CS (academia), a paper is published on a specific date, and very quickly becomes known. No such system exists in software engineering.
--Mark
 
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I would say:
1) Open source - not sure about 5 years but people now realise that opening up code for scrutiny is NOT chucking the family silver out.
2) Greater reuse. As soon as a useful library is released everyone is using it. remember ODBC-JDBC brige. nobody needs to write linked lists or sort routines anymore.
3) better UI. probably because of HTML, but the user has greater expectations of how intuitive a UI should be (goodbye VMS).
4) back to client(browser)-server(j2ee), fast release cycles, quick bug fixes.
5) Business oriented coders. Beards & Sandles developers have all been laid off!!!
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