Systems

The word “engineering” was applied to software deliberately, not descriptively. At a 1968 NATO conference in Garmisch, computer scientists chose the phrase “software engineering” as a provocation—an aspirational demand that the discipline impose on itself the rigor that physics imposes on civil and mechanical work. The word was not a recognition; it was a challenge. Fifty years later, the challenge remains unresolved. And the discomfort that trained engineers feel when they move into software—the sense that the ground is somehow less solid, the rules more negotiable, the stakes harder to calibrate—is not a failure of imagination. It is a correct perception of something genuinely different. …

Watch a photon leave the surface of the sun and arrive at your retina. Eight minutes earlier it was inside a star; now it is inside an eye. Of all the paths it could have taken — and physics, in some literal interpretations, says it did take all of them — the one that resolves into your day was the one that minimized a quantity called action. Light finds the cheap route. …