Science and the Compulsive Programmer

I thought this quote was interesting:

"Programming systems can, of course, be built without plan and without knowledge, let alone understanding, of the deep structural issues involved, just as houses, cities, systems of dams, and national economic policies can be similarly hacked together [...] But since there is no general theory of the whole system, the system itself can be only a more or less chaotic aggregate of subsystems whose influence on one another's behavior is discoverable only piecemeal and by experiment."

The thing I find interesting about it is that it seems medieval cathedrals were hacked together rather than designed in any modern sense. (Albeit over very long time spans: e.g. the interactions between a cathedral and the ground that has to bear its weight play out over the course of decades.)

Something to think about the next time you read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".