Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tpmx 2085 days ago
Because their fields are mature. Practitioner fundamentals haven't changed in decades, often not even in centuries.
2 comments

How do you define mature? Is it about stability? There are newer and more modern methods of construction and engineering and the field is always evolving. Maturity in those fields is about consistency and agreements of best practices enforced by standards and regulations. Software is not mature because it's not regulated. If you want software engineering to mature and stabilize, it needs more regulation.
Yes, construction etc is evolving, but it's doing that as such a slow pace compared to software engineering.
Are you sure? Construction materials are evolving and changing every few years (engineered lumber, modern environmentally friendly methods, etc) whilst we still use base operating systems designed in the 60's for most of our services.
Take a look at a house built [100, 50, 25] years ago. Compare it to a house built today.

Then do the same exercise with some piece of software.

yep, both are significantly different in many way, houses built 50 years ago have a lot of differences to modern houses. Software from 50 years ago, is also significantly different but the fundamentals of both are the same, foundations, walls, roof trusses, siding, filesystems, operating systems, processes, threads, data structures etc. We may use Go instead of C and we may use engineered lumber instead of Douglas Fir for door headers.
Go vs C: That's 50 years.

Wooden house building fundementals: That's like 200-500 years.

And scope-limited in comparison.