[pipingdog]

People are amazing at predicting the future, and in some ways we are better at it than remembering the past. That's because we use the same machinery to do both. We partly remember the future, and predict the past. This ability breaks down with complexity and abstractness, as well as with novelty, all of which are involved in software (I can tell you that the sun will come up tomorrow, and where I should move my hand to catch a ball, but I can't predict all of the defects my software will have--though if it involves X.509 certificates, I can tell you exactly when a particular sort of outage will occur)