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by pessimizer 4371 days ago
Other than the top 3, these seem to be differences between software and buildings rather than software designers and architects. In addition, I don't think the first three are true. Lastly, these are distinctions without any actual difference in the context of the metaphor, where "architect" could have been replaced by 'novelist' or 'cabinetmaker' and no information would have been lost.

edit: to be more specific about the top three; the first rests on the word "minute" which can be as large or small as you want, depending on what you're trying to prove. The second may be true now, but that's largely because we lack a specific language of high-level software abstraction, so the only way to learn it is to build a lot of things (the general point of the original passage, btw.) The third is just wrong - plenty of people are useful for building parts of software who would have no ability to design a large application. I suspect that those people are a majority of the industry.

1 comments

The vast differences between software and buildings correspond to the vast differences in designing them.

In context here, "minute detail" is obviously a relative term comparing the requirements of software and architecture design.

You just made up the "specific language" thing. The reason we don't get unicorns to write software for us is they don't exist either.

There are many incompetent software devs out there, but I don't see how anyone can possibly build any amount of software _well_ without having an appreciation of how to design it. This is why I used the word "capable".

The thing is, even if some of these things were similar to architecture, it would be by accident. They are, on the surface, totally different fields. On a deeper level, they're still totally different. The onus is on you to show the linkage, if you believe it to be applicable.