Comment by hulitu

> I am an academic mathematician, and I've noticed a huge culture difference between academia (at least in mathematics) and software development.

> In the software world, it seems to be universally accepted that everything will change, all of the time, and one needs to keep up. If your dependencies break, it's your responsibility to update those too. Hence software "maintenance", which requires a lot of effort.

> In my world, maintenance is not a concern. If I write a paper, then once it's done it's done. Academic papers, too, have dependencies: "By Theorem 3.4 of Jones and Smith [14], we can conclude that every quasiregular foozle is blahblah, and therefore..." You don't have to worry that Jones and Smith are going to rewrite their paper, change their definition of "quasiregular", or renumber everything.

> Different cultures. Personally, I prefer my own.

Those are the problem with SW developers: they don't have a concept of a finished product and (some of them) never finish the product.