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Oh dear. Thank goodness civil engineers do not build by trial and error. Many programmers do use the trial and error approach but their programs are riddled wit

Oh dear. Thank goodness civil engineers do not build by trial and error. Many programmers do use the trial and error approach but their programs are riddled with bugs. There is no way that code is the best or most useful "blueprint" for software. Your analogy is quite good, though, just not in the way you intended. If civil engineers did what you suggest then they would build magnificent structures which work in their office environment. Of course when that window that's never opened is opened by a cleaner everything comes tumbling down due to a gust of wind.

zimpenfish 9y ago
> Thank goodness civil engineers do not build by trial and error. Oh but they do. Hundreds - if not thousands - of years of trial and error and catastrophes and deaths. But the failures get written up, taught, remembered, and applied to future projects. (And even then not perfectly - witness Mexico City and buildings on a drained lake in an earthquake zone; or Houston's wild building expansion in a hurricane-prone floodplain.) Software, in contrast, has barely 60 years under its belt and a culture of hiding failures. Give it another 500 years and it'll start to look more like the architecting and building industries we have today.