I agree that the analogy doesn’t work in every way; my judgment was that the aspects that are non-analogous don’t significantly distract from the point. I think the primary difference is that software development has an external (as in, outside-the-human) component: in the software case, understanding the precise input/output behavior of a component isn’t synonymous with having ‘solved’ that part of the problem; you also have to implement the code. But the way in which the existence of the remaining problem leads to increased complexity from the perspective of the team working on the bottom-left part—and that’s the key point—seems perfectly analogous.
I’ve updated downward on how domain-specific I think FC is throughout writing the sequence, but I don’t have strong evidence on that point. I initially began by thinking and writing about exactly this, but the results were not super impressive and I eventually decided to exclude them entirely. Everything in the current version of the sequence is domain-general.
I agree that the analogy doesn’t work in every way; my judgment was that the aspects that are non-analogous don’t significantly distract from the point. I think the primary difference is that software development has an external (as in, outside-the-human) component: in the software case, understanding the precise input/output behavior of a component isn’t synonymous with having ‘solved’ that part of the problem; you also have to implement the code. But the way in which the existence of the remaining problem leads to increased complexity from the perspective of the team working on the bottom-left part—and that’s the key point—seems perfectly analogous.
I’ve updated downward on how domain-specific I think FC is throughout writing the sequence, but I don’t have strong evidence on that point. I initially began by thinking and writing about exactly this, but the results were not super impressive and I eventually decided to exclude them entirely. Everything in the current version of the sequence is domain-general.