[User23]

> it's common to read on HN that e.g. software is so young and immature compared to civil or electrical engineering

Just a nitpick, but civil engineering is at least two orders of magnitude older since it goes back to Babylon.

The really cool thing about programming's scientific maturity is that it's entirely constructed. We know all the ground rules because we created them. The engineering challenge is not making a mess of things despite having a potentially perfect understanding of program semantics. So despite building aqueducts being a couple order of magnitudes older than building programs, we actually understand the abstract rules of programming better than we do hydrodynamics.