[dorfsmay]

Machine learning has been around with no success from an industrial point of view until very recently. Until fairly recently, nobody cared and few understood big O notation.

Recent prog languages have added syntax to avoid issues such as "off by on error" (generator etc...), TDD is slowly becoming a standard everywhere. The next step to improve quality in software is formal verification IMO. There is quite a bit of research in that domain and even some academic program languages integrating it within their syntax.