>There's something in here that's specific to SWE. I don't know exactly what it is but, I think we should figure it out.
It's changing requirements. When you build a house, people don't come in 6 months later and ask you if you could make one small change by placing some jet engines on the walls so the house can fly somewhere else during the summer. It's just a small change, right?
The problem is that in code, it often is a small change. Or at least, it is possible to make one quick adjustment to satisfy this new use-case. But often, these small changes are also a hack which doesn't fit into the previous overall design and which would've been implemented in a completely different way had the requirement been designed for in the first place. Now, one of these "small changes" don't tend to kill the product, but years or even decades do. That's why refactoring exists in software engineering, but not really in home building. Well, in some sense it does exist by renovating. But nobody thinks it's a good idea to completely renovate a house 25 times around an architecture that just doesn't work anymore for what it's being used for.
If you build a piece of software for exactly one well specified use case and only use it for that, it'll probably run really well forever. But (almost) nobody does that.
It's changing requirements. When you build a house, people don't come in 6 months later and ask you if you could make one small change by placing some jet engines on the walls so the house can fly somewhere else during the summer. It's just a small change, right?
The problem is that in code, it often is a small change. Or at least, it is possible to make one quick adjustment to satisfy this new use-case. But often, these small changes are also a hack which doesn't fit into the previous overall design and which would've been implemented in a completely different way had the requirement been designed for in the first place. Now, one of these "small changes" don't tend to kill the product, but years or even decades do. That's why refactoring exists in software engineering, but not really in home building. Well, in some sense it does exist by renovating. But nobody thinks it's a good idea to completely renovate a house 25 times around an architecture that just doesn't work anymore for what it's being used for.
If you build a piece of software for exactly one well specified use case and only use it for that, it'll probably run really well forever. But (almost) nobody does that.