Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

Seibel: To say nothing of the scale. Two to the 64th of anything is a lot, and things happening billions of times a second is fast. Deutsch: But that doesn't bother us here in the real world. You know Avogadro's number, right? Ten to the 23rd? So, we're looking here around at a world that has incredible numbers of little things all clumped together and happening at the same time. It doesn't bother us because the world is such that you don't have to understand this table at a subatomic level. The physical properties of matter are such that 99.9 percent of the time you can understand it in aggregate. And everything you have to know about it, you can understand from dealing with it in aggregate. To a great extent, that is not true in the world of software. People keep trying to do modularization structures for software. And the state of that art has been improving over time, but it's still, in my opinion, very far away from the ease with which we look around and see things that have, whatever it is, 10 to the 23rd atoms in them, and it doesn't even faze us.