The difference is that creating "Hey Jude" is a completely creative effort, like making a painting or writing a novel. You can't estimate up front how long it'

The difference is that creating "Hey Jude" is a completely creative effort, like making a painting or writing a novel. You can't estimate up front how long it's going to take, it takes what it takes. The more you make it like an engineering process the more you remove the part that makes people interested in it. The "soul" if you will. Creating a map is an engineering process. You take data and translate into another form. A robot could do it. Translating from one language to another is the same thing in principle, but much harder [1]. Writing an English text book is a little more free form but probably what she was getting at is the fact that English doesn't belong to anyone. You're creating a description or view of something that already exists, not a new thing itself. A program slides even more toward art but at least you're given parameters. [1] A computer can't do this properly until we have much better AI. The translator has to be able to understand the feeling of the words and then express those in the target language if possible.