Something I sometimes think about in this vein: how many lines of code, written by how many people, in how many different times and places, are traversed on your computer every second?
It's kind of mind-blowing to me, and I can't think of anything else that works like that. It would be like if, when building a new house, you built it around an existing house, and continued to add layer after layer, and generations later the original house was still in constant use and supporting all the rest.
That's true, skyscrapers and cruise ships are pretty marvelous in a similar way. When I visited the Met in New York I was most fascinated by the building/complex itself. How many individual pieces, how many workers, how many design elements and functional considerations...
What makes software even more romantic is the "living" aspect of it. When you write a new text or build a new skyscraper, you incorporate the learnings and knowledge gained from prior work, but with software you actually embed a functioning copy that lives on and interacts with the new work. Repeat enough times and soon the "git blame" equivalent for your processor reflects an incomprehensible network of creative work from so many different people and times and organizations that mostly had little to no connection to each other.
It's kind of mind-blowing to me, and I can't think of anything else that works like that. It would be like if, when building a new house, you built it around an existing house, and continued to add layer after layer, and generations later the original house was still in constant use and supporting all the rest.