Who builds a house without drawing blueprints? (2015)
I don’t actually disagree with anything in the article, but comparisons between software and buildings - especially buildings - leave me cold.<p>There is almost nothing actually in common between software and buildings. You can’t move a house as a matter of course. You can’t modify a house in a few keystrokes. You can’t just copy a house or delete it. You don’t generally consider how a house will evolve over time. A house has a limited number of possible states, and a trivially low number of entrances and exits. The analogy is so poor that it’s difficult even to make analogies about how bad an analogy it is.<p>I have thought for a long time that building analogies are horribly ill suited to software. Perhaps better than nothing, but only barely. Software is a thing unto itself and I just find these analogies make we want to run away screaming.