That's true, skyscrapers and cruise ships are pretty marvelous in a similar way. When I visited the Met in New York I was most fascinated by the building/comple

That's true, skyscrapers and cruise ships are pretty marvelous in a similar way. When I visited the Met in New York I was most fascinated by the building/complex itself. How many individual pieces, how many workers, how many design elements and functional considerations... What makes software even more romantic is the "living" aspect of it. When you write a new text or build a new skyscraper, you incorporate the learnings and knowledge gained from prior work, but with software you actually embed a functioning copy that lives on and interacts with the new work. Repeat enough times and soon the "git blame" equivalent for your processor reflects an incomprehensible network of creative work from so many different people and times and organizations that mostly had little to no connection to each other.