> Software has a magical property that other engineering disciplines do not: The engineering environment is ideal and fundamentally perfect. It's like building electronic circuits but only in the simulator that uses all idealized parts.
I get where you are coming from, but man it is very apparent that you haven't had to write device drivers. Hardware is BUGGY and the OS is full of workarounds to make things work well enough most of the time.
EDIT: And now that I think about it, the same is true of any piece of software that interacts with other software components. Your own code ends up full of workarounds to address problems in your external dependencies.
> Software guys, free form those chains and working in a parallel universe of perfect logic, instead are pushed to the absolute limits of complexity
That resonates. You could say that in other branches of engineering complexity is a consequence of natural entropy, whereas in software complexity is largely self-inflicted. Did I get it right?
I'd say with classic engineering, mother nature wrote the OS, so across all the disciplines there is a common shared experience of dealing with Reality OS. Which is eminently present in every step of work.
In SWE, we figured out how to build a VM in Reality OS that runs our own custom environment. All the headache and complexity is there, but it is of a different lineage.
I get where you are coming from, but man it is very apparent that you haven't had to write device drivers. Hardware is BUGGY and the OS is full of workarounds to make things work well enough most of the time.
EDIT: And now that I think about it, the same is true of any piece of software that interacts with other software components. Your own code ends up full of workarounds to address problems in your external dependencies.
> Software guys, free form those chains and working in a parallel universe of perfect logic, instead are pushed to the absolute limits of complexity
That resonates. You could say that in other branches of engineering complexity is a consequence of natural entropy, whereas in software complexity is largely self-inflicted. Did I get it right?