Nothing is made entirely by machines. At some point it's made by hand. The thing is software is a bit like doing clay pottery when it's not properly done. Once you add a bit of a systematic approach to it and you test is, review it, it becomes a bit closer to an industrial product.
The thing is the rest of the world is also in a state of flux. Plumbers changed materials quite a few times in the past decade which changed the fixtures a bit. So the concept is the same (ie. design patterns) but the actual material and its characteristics changed (ie. framework, programming languages) and there are different ways to put them together: welding, glue, etc (ie. APIs).
But changing some material, fixtures and binding material doesn't even compare to the kind of flexibility we have with software!
The solution for plumbers is that they always use what's current. Which makes their field as much of a fashion-driven field as ours (think about it).
But give them an existing house with multi-layer pipes and tell them to fix it and they will also comment that it's old tech and you should switch to copper or whatever.
In conclusion, I don't see how software is any different than other fields except that we are much more flexible and go with a much greater speed.
Software is at its infancy because science in general is at its infancy.
The thing is the rest of the world is also in a state of flux. Plumbers changed materials quite a few times in the past decade which changed the fixtures a bit. So the concept is the same (ie. design patterns) but the actual material and its characteristics changed (ie. framework, programming languages) and there are different ways to put them together: welding, glue, etc (ie. APIs).
But changing some material, fixtures and binding material doesn't even compare to the kind of flexibility we have with software!
The solution for plumbers is that they always use what's current. Which makes their field as much of a fashion-driven field as ours (think about it).
But give them an existing house with multi-layer pipes and tell them to fix it and they will also comment that it's old tech and you should switch to copper or whatever.
In conclusion, I don't see how software is any different than other fields except that we are much more flexible and go with a much greater speed.
Software is at its infancy because science in general is at its infancy.