> we write precise prose designed to elicit specific responses from machines

There are programmers who do that, and I think it's the way to make good software, to care about what the machine actually does that is, and not just if it's easier to write one line instead of five (which is where we got this bloated framework mess from)... but it's hardly some sort of standard for the profession, much less the minimum.

With engineering (I would assume), you rarely see, say, some sort of tool (made by an engineer, that is) that has half of another tool sticking out of it in a spot "where it doesn't matter" because they preferred to ship faster. You'll never see a tool that just weighs 100x more than it needs to because hey who cares, it's not like the person who made and sold that thing actually has to use it.

With software, costs are externalized left and right because to see them, you'd have to actively think about stuff, and customers don't know anyway so anything goes, unless you go too far. But if a washing machine is the size of half a city, everyone notices.

> With “classic” engineering at least you have the immutable laws of physics to judge your work, but with software we have no such luck - software is infinitely pliable in ways equivalent to bending the laws of physics in classical engineering. Your bridge may not be sound at one Earth gravity, or your software might not work reliably with a gigabyte of memory, but it’s like we can place your bridge under half G by giving the software twice as much memory. And we can do all that after building our “bridges”.

In that example, software isn't actually "plied" (if that is a word?) though, the amount of RAM is. So the software stays as is, mediocre. And art, like engineering, often benefits from constraints. Imagine if the solution to being a shitty artist would be to just drug the audience so they're happier and like whatever they're seeing more. Even if it benefited them, even if you could tell them and they'd be fine with it, that's not the way to hone a craft, that just seems obvious on the surface to me.