[nine_k]

I'm certain that brothers Wright did not have a rigorous mathematical model of their airplane. It is well known that Bell's telephone was invented by accident. I suspect we still lack a comprehensive theory of pizza-making.

Sometimes you just hit a mother lode, and keep digging, preferably doing proper geological research along the way. But to postpone practical applications before a complete theory is ready is to lack business sense.

[zokier]

But we are not in Wright era of computing. We are in the 737 era, or should be. But somehow our methods are not tracking that. Experimentation has its place, but it should be followed by rigor which we are very much missing.

[nine_k]

I'm afraid we are still not even in the brothers Wright era of project planning, though. At least, im many areas. In some areas we (humans) have considerable successes, like building oil rigs in the ocean. I suspect we lack a good understanding of software requirements. From it, to my mind, inadequate management practices follow.

[Jtsummers]

I've written something like this before, but I'll say it again:

The difficulty in software is its detachment from physics (when compared to other disciplines categorized as engineering). There are few physical couplings you can make with your transmission system or steering wheel. But with software, your couplings are essentially unbounded. This permits radically unsafe and unmaintainable software, where an equivalent physical system likely wouldn't even move. The nearest, in physical engineering, is electrical systems. But even then you still have to drive power through a constrained system and either can't power everything or set something on fire.

This forces a practical limit on how you design physical systems. A kind of simplicity often falls out as a consequence. But in software, complexity still reigns supreme because it can. Without a deliberate effort, it is easy to develop a complex system that is hard to maintain, hard to verify, hard to validate, and hard to extend.