"But it brings up another more interesting question: why does the way we naturally measure complexity stop working when we apply it to programming?" Ah and I h

"But it brings up another more interesting question: why does the way we naturally measure complexity stop working when we apply it to programming?" Ah and I had high hopes for that next paragraph, There are two fundamental differences between, lets say, estimating how long it will take to make a sandwich, and estimating how long it will take to create an online noticeboard for your village. The first difference is that one task is manufacture, the second task is design. Writing code IS design, and it is inherently much harder (or even logically impossible) to estimate because implicitly you do not know what done means. The second difference is that (broadly) how satisfactory a sandwich or other real world object is, is proportional to how long it takes to make. This is not true for software, because it is not a physical entity. It can be tripped up by a single incorrect character, and then, forget tasty - your software sandwich doesn't even exist.