[siracguy]

Yes, this industry is still very young. Another way to think about it is that we still build software the way they built cars in 1905 - to a large extent, most products are build from scratch by hand to serve a very specific set of requirements.

Admittedly OSs, compilers and frameworks are significant steps forward from pure Assembly language, but we're still a far cry from how autos are built today: automakers build a "car platform" by composing different systems, which themselves are composed of assemblies and sub-assemblies and so on. The platform is then targeted towards a specific application by bolting a car body on top, this body is usually separate from the core engineering systems of the car.

[kragen]

A software product is a copy of runnable software installed on a computer. The vast, vast majority of such products are built the same way cars will be built in 2055: entirely automatically, with automatic testing and verification, with no human intervention whatsoever.

It's generally only when we are designing a new piece of software that has to handle a new set of requirements that we start building things by hand; but even then, we almost always use assemblies and sub-assemblies called "libraries" to get the bulk of the design. Then we run the design through a compiler and linker, which automatically manufactures a runnable copy of the software, and then we test it.

Mathematics builds new theorems the same way we build new software and the same way General Motors builds new car blueprints. This is likely to change somewhat as car manufacturing becomes more similar to writing software.