Despite coming from a chemical engineering background, I didn’t fully recognize the existence of …

… Despite coming from a chemical engineering background, I didn’t fully recognize the existence of this gap until I started working in HPC. Now I see it everywhere in software. When I worked in HPC, I started hacking together crude models and solvers to address difficult optimization problems that took an excruciating amount of time to iterate on, a primitive version of what you might do as a chemical engineer, and it was a game changer. But it was an enormous amount of effort because there is no tooling to do this in software, even if it occurred to you that it might be a good idea for the same reason it is a good idea in every other engineering discipline. I think we got away with it for a long time because early software systems were legitimately quite simple. We could live with it. Software is now vastly more complex. While our tooling has evolved to address problems of abstractions, it has not evolved to address the problem of systems behavior and modeling. The ability to see the effects of system design changes without actually implementing them is powerful. …