Software's real advantage over physical engineering is consistency: a component does what it is specified to do every time, while physical materials only fall within a tolerance.

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• The one uncontested difference between software and other engineering is velocity: changing software costs seconds where changing a physical system costs weeks and thousands of dollars. HWHillel Wayne20 Jan 2021
• Software's constraints are soft where traditional engineering's are hard, and that is one of the few real differences between them. HWHillel Wayne20 Jan 2021
• The usual trade-off between quality and cost does not apply to software: high internal quality is the cheaper way to produce it. MFMartin Fowler29 May 2019
• Software is not less rigorous than traditional engineering; its record-keeping and automated verification are better than most of that field's. HWHillel Wayne20 Jan 2021
• Chinese consumer electronics tend to have better hardware than software. TMTom MacWright24 Jul 2026

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