Why computer boffins still have to use some of that old black magic

Apple fans all over the world will be happy to see that Mac OS 8 came out bang on time. This, of course, is only the first step on a long, long road.

It may seem odd to praise a company for doing things it says it is going to do, but software is a notorious area to work in.

People constantly bring up the analogy of the car or aircraft: if planes or cars were made the way software is, then there would be crashes and disasters all the time.

So what is the big difference? When you build a solid thing such as a plane or a car, you are dealing with pieces of metal, plastic, leather (if you are lucky) and other bits of the real world that are combined to create the final object.

At the most basic level, cars and planes have not really changed all that much in a long time. The engines are fairly standardised today and the laws of physics that govern how a heavy object stays in the air for a few hours without falling also have not changed.

In software, we enter a dark world of the unknown. Despite the fact that we call the discipline 'computer science' there is a lot that is more art - some would prefer to say black magic - than science in the efforts made to make computers do what we want them to.