The analogy between bridge building and software is very old and very wrong.
Software can indeed be designed like a bridge, proven and then built for one unchanging use case and set in stone. And unless you are writing for NASA, soon enough that code will be junked as an obsolete millstone because use cases change. No engineer could design a bridge that might have to be rebuilt into an aircraft runway, or a 20-floor apartment complex, at a whim.
> The analogy between bridge building and software is very old and very wrong.
I disagree. I think that the assumptions and use cases just change much more quickly in software than in the physical world.
The covered bridges from 150 years ago were built with the assumption that they'd be used for horses, carts and people. When cars became the primary mode of transportation then those assumptions no longer held. No one would say that the original bridge was poorly built, just that the use case changed.
Similarly, software that was built with the assumption that network access is slow has had its typical use case change. Software that was built to keep things on disk because RAM is expensive needed to change. Pretty soon we'll all demand that software assume that disk access is fast again because we'll move to SSDs.
Comments
The analogy between bridge building and software is very old and very wrong.
Software can indeed be designed like a bridge, proven and then built for one unchanging use case and set in stone. And unless you are writing for NASA, soon enough that code will be junked as an obsolete millstone because use cases change. No engineer could design a bridge that might have to be rebuilt into an aircraft runway, or a 20-floor apartment complex, at a whim.
> The analogy between bridge building and software is very old and very wrong.
I disagree. I think that the assumptions and use cases just change much more quickly in software than in the physical world.
The covered bridges from 150 years ago were built with the assumption that they'd be used for horses, carts and people. When cars became the primary mode of transportation then those assumptions no longer held. No one would say that the original bridge was poorly built, just that the use case changed.
Similarly, software that was built with the assumption that network access is slow has had its typical use case change. Software that was built to keep things on disk because RAM is expensive needed to change. Pretty soon we'll all demand that software assume that disk access is fast again because we'll move to SSDs.