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