[scott_s]

I've mentioned this a bunch already on HN, but I recommend reading "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn. The book was published before most people had even heard the phrase "computer science," but I think that computer science still follows some of the patterns he talks about.

In Kuhn's view, "normal science" is mostly iterative and incremental. It is so because most people in the discipline agree on most of the big issues, and people are mostly refining those understandings. The periods where people don't agree on the big issues in a discipline is around the time of scientific revolutions: the solutions to such big issues are so different from previous approaches that accepting them requires a complete re-think of what the discipline is.

A lot of areas of CS are in the "normal science" part of that cycle, and I think compilers and languages are in there. (The biggest argument against that is concurrency and parallelism.) In the 60s and 70s, programming languages were new, and they changed computer science forever. We were exploring what these things could be.

I also recommend Cristina Videira Lopes's blog post, "The Evolution of CS Papers": http://tagide.com/blog/2014/02/the-evolution-of-cs-papers/