Constraints Breed Discipline

Walk into any old stone church and look up. The arches, buttresses, and ribbed vaults that hold the roof against gravity for a thousand years were not chosen for their beauty. They were chosen because stone is heavy and weak in tension, and the people who built those walls had to obey what stone could do. The beauty came later, almost as a side effect. The masons did not have the option to ignore the material. They could not summon a new substance into existence by writing a manifesto about it. The constraint of the stone forced them to think harder, and the thinking is what produced cathedrals. Software has very few constraints like that, and the ones it does have can be dissolved by writing more software. A bridge engineer cannot decide that load-bearing walls are inconvenient and abolish them by Friday. A pharmacist cannot ship a new compound on Tuesday because the deadline is Wednesday. We can. Every boundary we encounter is implemented in code, and code can be rewritten by…