Chapter. Paradigms, engineering, and architecture

The foundation of Steve McConnell’s seminal text, Code Complete, was that software development should be based around the paradigm of construction. But that was fundamentally flawed because of the mythical man-month—the “man-month” term itself originally coming from construction work.

We now know McConnell was wrong and software isn’t construction, it is engineering. And we’re called “software engineers,” not “software workers” for this reason: we’re engineers, not construction workers.