我认为没有什么重要的东西被发明出来。但自80年代以来，人们对软件的看法发生了很大变化。那时有更多的理论家参与其中，现在你在一个程序员论坛上问这个问题。

当时的大多数想法都没有得到实施，或者即使实施了，它们也没有任何真正的重要性，因为当时的软件行业还不存在，市场营销、人力资源、开发阶段或alpha版本也不存在:)。

Another reason for this lack of inventions is the fact that most people use Windows:) dont get me wrong, i do hate M$, but look at it this way: you have a perfectly working interface, with nothing new to add to it, maybe just some new colored buttons. Its also closed enough so you wont be able to to anything with it without breaking it. Thats why i prefer open apps, this way you get more "open" people, to whom yo can actually talk, ask then questions, propose new ideeas that actually gets implemented, or at least put on an open todo-list, thus you get some kind of "evolution". You dont really see anything new because you are stuck with the same basic interface "invented" lots of years ago... did anyone actually tried ION window-manager in a production environment? It has a new kind of interface, and actually lets you do things faster, event it it looks quirky

M$, Adobe..you name it,holds lots of patents so you wont be able to base your work on them, or derivatives(you also wont know what kind of undeveloped tehnologies they hold). Look at MP3 and GIF as examples( i belive that they are both free formats now, but they are also kinda dead..) MP3 is the 'king' of audio evend if there are few algorithms out there much better that it..but didnt get enough traction because they weren't pushed on the consumer market. The GIF... come on, 256 colors??? From this point of voew i'm curios how many people from this thread are working on something "open" that will get to be reused in some other projects, and how many on "closed", protected by NDA's projects?

即使这听起来有点像“免费的威利”，但在80年代，软件是免费的，所有东西都有文档，所有硬件都更简单，更容易使用……同时也更加有限，所以人们并没有浪费时间去执行3d游戏或网页，而是致力于真正的算法。

我不知道是否有人已经回答了，“机器学习”作为一个重要的新发展，正在迅速发展。智能垃圾邮件过滤、股市预测、机器人等智能机器……

也许，机器智能会是下一个大事件。

I'd say the biggest trend is an ever increasing lack of location dependence and pervasiveness. An interesting philosophical exercise these days is to count the computers in you immediate area. They're everywhere desktops, keyboards, microwaves, radios, televisions, cell phones etc... My grandmother computer is illiterate however her life is as infested with small computers as everyone else's. She can make a call to me from the middle of an empty field. I can then answer that call zipping down the highway.

除了硬件创新之外，我倾向于发现太阳底下几乎没有新的东西。大多数真正伟大的想法都可以追溯到冯·诺依曼和艾伦·图灵这样的人。

如今，许多被贴上“技术”标签的东西实际上只是某人编写的程序或库，或者是用新的隐喻、首字母缩写或品牌名称对旧思想进行翻新。

回答“为什么新思想会消亡”和“如何应对”这两个问题?

I suspect a lot of the lack of progress is due to the massive influx of capital and entrenched wealth in the industry. Sounds counterintuitive, but I think it's become conventional wisdom that any new idea gets one shot; if it doesn't make it at the first try, it can't come back. It gets bought by someone with entrenched interests, or just FAILs, and the energy is gone. A couple examples are tablet computers, and integrated office software. The Newton and several others had real potential, but ended up (through competitive attrition and bad judgment) squandering their birthrights, killing whole categories. (I was especially fond of Ashton Tate's Framework; but I'm still stuck with Word and Excel).

怎么办呢?首先想到的是Wm。莎士比亚的建议:“让我们杀了所有的律师。”但恐怕他们现在装备太精良了。实际上，我认为最好的选择是找到某种开源计划。它们似乎比其他选择更好地保持可访问性和增量改进。但是这个行业已经变得足够大了，所以某种有机的合作机制是必要的。

I also think that there's a dynamic that says that the entrenched interests (especially platforms) require a substantial amount of change - churn - to justify continuing revenue streams; and this absorbs a lot of creative energy that could have been spent in better ways. Look how much time we spend treading water with the newest iteration from Microsoft or Sun or Linux or Firefox, making changes to systems that for the most part work fine already. It's not because they are evil, it's just built into the industry. There's no such thing as Stable Equilibrium; all the feedback mechanisms are positive, favoring change over stability. (Did you ever see a feature withdrawn, or a change retracted?)

关于SO的另一个讨论线索是臭鼬工厂综合症(参考:Geoffrey Moore):在大型组织中，真正的创新几乎总是(90%以上)出现在自发出现的未经授权的项目中，这些项目完全由个人或小团队的主动性推动(通常会受到正式的管理等级的反对)。所以:质疑权威，反抗体制。

JIT编译是在20世纪80年代末发明的。