The Greatest Invention in Computer Science

I was reading Jeff Atwood's article titled "The Greatest Invention in Computer Science" (coincidentally the same title as this blog entry), where he states that the routine is the greatest invention in computer science.

It makes me wonder one thing: "Does Jeff Atwood really know that much about computer science?"

Routines are an excellent addition to software development, but contrary to the opinion of many, computer science is not just about software development.

Personally I'd say there are several greatest inventions in computer science. Routines are good, but pale in comparison to the concept of a high-level programming language. Hard to imagine software development without those. Networking was another one (although this is a bit of a cooperation between electrical engineering, computer engineering and computer science). Software development has been done without it, but it has definitely made a big difference, computers being able to talk to one another without the use of removable media. And the list goes on, from the various sub-domains of computer science that I have missed here. One of my favourites is the concept of reduction - converting a problem to another problem that we've already solved. (This reminds me of a quick joke: A computer scientist sees a house burning down. Solution? Call fire department. Later, that computer scientist sees a house that is not burning down. Solution? Light the house on fire, thus reducing it to a previous problem.)

Perhaps it's my youth, I haven't been around long enough to use a language that doesn't have routines. Oh wait, that's not true. I did assembly language in university. We had to write recursive algorithms for tree processing in assembly. Not too hard, but you have to remember all this stuff about pushing your registers and return address onto the stack to save their state when you recursively call the function, then remember all this stuff about what offset of the current stack pointer your value is located at, etc. Yes, routines are nice, except when you have to do them in assembly language - this is another reason why we don't use assembly language.

Computer science extends far beyond the realm of writing software, but many people seem to lose sight of that fact. They think, "oh, you took computer science in school, you must be able to fix my computer." I tell them that we didn't learn that kind of thing in school. Nor did we learn about how to use Excel. Or what all those business technical acronyms mean (although if one business major could tell me what SAT stands for, I'd be impressed). We learn about how the stuff we use in software development and other computer-related fields works today, so that we may improve upon those methods to make better stuff 10 years from now.

So, routines are nice, but to claim they are the greatest invention in computer science? Please.