Software engineering and the pyramids

“If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.”

Alan Kay in an interview for Queue magazine, to which the interviewer replies

The analogy is even better because there are the hidden chambers that nobody can understand.