> There is something peculiar about software that makes it different from other crafts. What distinguishes software from other techne is a lack of physics. The

> There is something peculiar about software that makes it different from other crafts. What distinguishes software from other techne is a lack of physics. There is no 'solid ground of reality'. All other forms of making involve discovering and then applying the governing laws. Hardware architectures, operating system, and programming languages, to an extent, do furnish a phenomenal context and where these characteristics are stable and well established (e.g. Memory Models), science appears [1]. But clearly, this ground of reality is indeed 'soft' and the practitioners usually re-invent not just the wheel, but the ground that it rolls on as well. The dilemma -- which nearly means facing a choice of a multiplicity of lemmas -- that confronts the designers of hardware, OS, and languages is precisely that tension between generality (and corresponding weak "world" semantics) and specificity (with robust but constrained semantics). [1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-851-advanced-data-structures-spring-2012/lecture-videos/session-22-history-of-memory-models/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...