[ScottBurson]

Buildings have a far smaller state space, and that space is highly decomposable. There are only so many doors in the building that can be open or closed, lights that can be on or off, HVAC zones that can be on or off, or elevators that can be going up or down or stopped at a floor, etc. And few of those states interact.

Software systems have astronomical numbers of states, and while most of the discipline of software engineering is about how to minimize unintended interactions between them while still producing the intended interactions, we still wind up with lots of the unintended kind.

[snowwrestler]

There's a lot more to the state of a building than a human interfaces. When the ambient temperature changes, the state of the building changes. When the wind blows, the state of the building changes. When it rains, the state of the building changes. As materials age, the state of the building changes.

We're just so much more familiar with these forces and states that we can reliably model and design for them, and then (as with your comment) not worry about them anymore.

We take it for granted that our buildings won't fall down in a storm. But the knowledge of how to do that had to be developed and standardized at some point.

[arielb1]

For buildings not collapsing, the main thing that matters is that the structure's strength is larger that the applied forces. Edge cases can be solved by adding more material, or more intelligently by having enough redundancy that you have enough strength even if a small number of components fail.

This, of course, does not apply to software functionality - you can't fix bugs by "more CPU power". However, if you look in the places where you can apply this methodology - like cloud services - you find that they are indeed very reliable.

[joepvd]

It does not happen that often that one hears: "I don't like the looks of the building when it rains. Replace the facade, pretty please!"

[Asooka]

Also, moving the oven from one end of the kitchen to the other doesn't require replacing the support beams in the garage.

[joe_the_user]

If the materials of software are for-loops or text files, I think one can say that "we" are familiar with them.

A simple program or a simple piece of a large is something one can be very familiar with.

Indeed, the particular parts are more predictable than particular parts of buildings, who behavior changes over time, which literally rather than metaphorically wear-out, which have to simultaneously fulfill a number of functions simultaneously, etc.

So I think it is ultimately a matter of the state-space of the ingredients rather than a lack of familiarity with the materials.