Sure, and civil engineering is really different from chemical engineering. But those are minor compared with the differences between physical engineering discip

Sure, and civil engineering is really different from chemical engineering. But those are minor compared with the differences between physical engineering disciplines and software engineering. Software engineers: - cost of components is $0 (use one class or split into 2, there is no cost metric to decide) - physics don't apply to components (we can't use this doping agent because X or Y. We need to move the factory to an area of low seismic activity to improve yields etc.. etc..) Basically, physical engineers have so many constraints, solving the problem is the hard part. Software engineers have so few constraints, usually solving the problem is the easy part, and we have time left over to argue about abstract cleanliness concepts like composition vs. inheritance and such. (Again, this is the rule, the exception is problems like "We need this service to do 2 million requests per second", and there we don't argue about functional vs. OOP, you do anything you can to hit the number)