But all the greatest minds in the field had failed to do so after 1000 years of effort. The sum of all the successes in the field was minute. At the time, we might reasonably have concluded that chemistry was a discipline not worth our time and effort. Students would wisely have been cautioned to choose another field of study with better prospects, perhaps astrology or blood letting. In fact, chemistry is one of the outstanding success stories in the human search for knowledge because interested scientists persevered through lean times and because a few key discoveries opened the doors to many more.
Software engineering is in the same position.
The field is young. The subject domain is vast and difficult to catalog. But new sciences always flail around with qualitative, short-lived results in their early years. The newness of a field does not mean it is less important or less worthy of our best study. The newness of software engineering, to the contrary, means it is ripe with opportunities for seminal discoveries.