<p>Having now been in the "computing" business for a long time this type of story comes around with a monotonous regularity, in one form or another. Of course the short answer is that architects and builders did build structures that fell around peoples ears. Over the several thousand years that man / woman has been building habitable and ceremonial structures there have been numerous disasters and these mistakes have learnt from and acted on. Over the few years, 50? that people have been programming a great deal has also been learned and applied and will continue to do so until software reaches the same levels of success, maybe.</p> <p>If however we are going to draw parallels between the two professions then what happens in software is that the software engineer turns up at the clients with a solid well designed structure, at which point the client insists that it cannot be that way and must be built with state of the art, untried and untested materials, must (metaphorically) be 4 miles high and stretch out of a windswept, storm prone, earthquake zone landscape for 800 yards, take the weight of 600 people (a second) and be done in half the quoted time and three quarters of the budget.</p>

Posted by: John Howitt 27 May 2005