My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Programming i.e, building software, for me is about,

• Data
• Make Decisions based on the Data
• Do Actions, typically by Divide and Conquer, based on those Decisions

In fact, doing the above is a part of every day life
eg) ToDo Lists, Appointments, Assessments, Party …

var, if, goto.

Pretty mundane.

Now if you look at a microphone, even there you
find Data and a number of Decisions to make, like what to Record.

You might want noise-cancellation, for example.

The challenges usually lie in scale for software,
i.e, lots and lots and lots of things happening and you
need answers in real-time.

But even before you get into scaling, you face the

        Combinatorial Explosion
             Explosion ?
                Yes !

Let’s say you are writing an addition software,
for adding just two numbers, or at-least that’s what
you heard the client say.

1 + 1
> it compiles !

What About 1 + 1.0 ?

And 1/2 + 1
And 1/5 + 2.2
And “22.9” + 1/2
And “22.8” + 0x12ff
And 1/2 + “1/2356”
And 11.11001100111 + 0.25
And Romanian UTF-14 numbers ?

Maybe next version …

What is more troubling is, now you have a Floating Point bug,
and you are just staring at the screen, *_*, because you finally
realize, it was you who put the explosives, aka Flexibility™, there.

The client wants to add different currencies, by tomorrow btw.

Can engineering knowledge be used to preempt combinatorial explosions?

See Also:
1] Feature Creep