I've seen a lot of industries compared to programming, like construction and manufacturing. For example, people trying to apply lessons from the Toyota Production System to programming.
This doesn't make sense, because we have systematized the construction of executable programs with extremely high reliability and predictability: we call it "Copy File"
It's the design that is the hard part, and the process of coding is the process of iterating on the design. Even turning the design into an executable is extremely reliable, either running via a VM or scripting engine, or compiling. Those are all very repeatable and reliable.
There are other disciplines that focus on creating and improving designs (like writing, painting, architecture, 3D modeling), but it's not like they're reliable or predictable either, unless you're designing very similar things over and over again. That's true of coding as well, but you don't really end up doing that, because once you've done it 3 times you should make a library and then never do that part again, just the unique bits.
In short, yeah, coding is its own thing, and I doubt it'll ever be predictable unless you're wasting a lot of time and effort doing very similar things over and over.
This point was recognized quite early. there is an influential article by Jack W. Reeves from 1992 [1] that looks at the manufacturing analogy and argues that "the code is the design" whereas the "manufacturing" is just the compilation and packaging (that is, super cheap and automated). I believe it‘s this line of thinking that inspired Agile practices, where software developers are seen as engineers rather than code monkeys.
Design but also requirements. You don't really know what should be built until you have a prototype. And estimating how long it will take to come up with a prototype that does what you think it should do, in other words coming up with requirements, is just the snake eating its tail.
I like to compare programming to the marketing industry.
Highly creative work and when deadlines are involved the work becomes spurty (sprints) with corner cutting (scope reduction) to meet unrealistic and over committed deadlines.
This doesn't make sense, because we have systematized the construction of executable programs with extremely high reliability and predictability: we call it "Copy File"
It's the design that is the hard part, and the process of coding is the process of iterating on the design. Even turning the design into an executable is extremely reliable, either running via a VM or scripting engine, or compiling. Those are all very repeatable and reliable.
There are other disciplines that focus on creating and improving designs (like writing, painting, architecture, 3D modeling), but it's not like they're reliable or predictable either, unless you're designing very similar things over and over again. That's true of coding as well, but you don't really end up doing that, because once you've done it 3 times you should make a library and then never do that part again, just the unique bits.
In short, yeah, coding is its own thing, and I doubt it'll ever be predictable unless you're wasting a lot of time and effort doing very similar things over and over.