[wissler]

One of the great things about working in software is that if you want to work at the frontier and push the limits of what has been done before, you still can. Your peers may deride you as a "cowboy programmer", but they can't stop you.

Many other fields have been so heavily regulated by government that truly pushing the boundaries is either far more painful or impossible, therefore the pace of improvement in them is far slower than it is in the world of software.