The meta message of the parable is programming is, in actual practice, an art, not a vocation or profession. For political / economic reasons we sometimes have to pretend its a vocation or profession, but it really isn't in actual application. Software architecture should be in the "fine arts" department at university, not a branch of finance, engineering, or math.
In art, people expect the highest quality producers to instantly produce effortless appearing product (music, dance, painting, sport, drama, whatever) and are generally willing to pay for quality unless they're a hopelessly tasteless neanderthal. The only time effort is rewarded in art is when parents watch their (own) kids perform.
One epic fail of the parable is it was written in an era of C (pascal?) dominance where 500 LOC means something different then from now. That would be at least 2000 lines of boilerplate-ish java (think of the classic "enterprise hello world" java implementation) or 10 lines of clojure and pretty much everything else fits in between. Something that has stayed constant over the decades, from my observation, is a "complicated functional block" takes maybe three hours long term total average, a "little bit less than before/after lunchhour", and the only determiner of how many LoC are produced in that time is language quality and programmer quality. Maybe another way to phrase it, is a correctly sized block on a project flowchart takes a couple hours in all languages for a given class of programmer ability.
While software architecture certainly is an art, I would not say it is unique in that aspect among the fields you mentioned. Both engineering and maths should be considered art in their own rights.
If you consider abstract mathematics, it is easily seen that many mathematicians find most of their inspiration in the aesthetics of their ideas. Somehow the way we teach maths obscures this fact from the students.
Oh, and if you didn't already: Read «Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance». Aside from being a great story, it goes into detail about how technical work becomes art when done with Quality in mind.
In art, people expect the highest quality producers to instantly produce effortless appearing product (music, dance, painting, sport, drama, whatever) and are generally willing to pay for quality unless they're a hopelessly tasteless neanderthal. The only time effort is rewarded in art is when parents watch their (own) kids perform.
One epic fail of the parable is it was written in an era of C (pascal?) dominance where 500 LOC means something different then from now. That would be at least 2000 lines of boilerplate-ish java (think of the classic "enterprise hello world" java implementation) or 10 lines of clojure and pretty much everything else fits in between. Something that has stayed constant over the decades, from my observation, is a "complicated functional block" takes maybe three hours long term total average, a "little bit less than before/after lunchhour", and the only determiner of how many LoC are produced in that time is language quality and programmer quality. Maybe another way to phrase it, is a correctly sized block on a project flowchart takes a couple hours in all languages for a given class of programmer ability.