Legendary Productivity and the Fear of Modern Programming

They're all Pascal-like, and therefore ALGOL-like, sharing a lot of similarities; not just syntax, but also concepts such as ranged types, range-bound arrays, enums, record syntax, etc. You can know Pascal and be able to pick up Modula or Oberon very quickly, since so many keywords and concepts are identical. At the same time, each iteration tried to simplify the language (the BNF for Oberon has only 33 grammar rules).

https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java/1999-q2/msg00419.html

"[...] Knuth definitely wrote most of the code himself, at least for the Metafont re-write, for which I have pesonal knowledge. However, some of his students (such as Michael Plass and John Hobby) did work on the algorithms used in TeX and Metafont. He also did have a programmer (David something) working for him at one point, but not as I recall at the time of the Metafont re-write."

That said, some solid source on the earliest phases, as well as on particulars of the specific "algorithms", would be nice to learn.

It certainly isn't a natural phenomenon.

"Emergence" doesn't have any bearing on it. The properties of music and art are emergent, too. Doesn't make them not constructed by humans.

An economy based on property ownership, investment, and labor is absolutely a system created by humanity, though you could argue many of its observed properties are emergent.

Economic theory dating back to the late 1700's arguably were the first major attempts at retroactive design of the global economy. There've been other pockets of this happening, but not globally, more likely the monetary and debt systems of various epochs and empires.

But after retroactively observing market exchange, most classical economic theory became pretty prescriptive, i.e. it wasn't a reflection of "human nature" so much as that was an easy way to promote free market ideals.

For example, the "profit motive" has been basically disproven as something that never actually existed historically or anthropologically as a universal human driver. It was invented by economists as useful way to explain away certain aspects of their system design. This is not to say some people were not and are not motivated by profit.. sure they are. It's just not universal, like hunger, or breathing.

Markets also weren't omnipresent throughout human history until proto-economists noticed them, wrote about them, and businessmen began convincing governments to apply them by force to various communities in the 1800s. (see Karl Polanyi, the Great Transformation).

One could argue that economics is really "software design for the world economy", except you need to test and debug in production. Religious wars about better designs and features abound (fiat currency vs. gold standard; Keynesians vs. Rational Expectations / Real Business Cycles; Austrians vs. Science; etc.)