Love the gist of this, but just wanted to point out, but there's no need to draw the line between buildings and gardening. Anyone who has built a house or done major remodel knows that it too suffers from fractal complexity. It may not be a nail that becomes a wormhole of complexity (as neither is something simple arithmetic operations in programming), but all kinds of things can crop up. The soil has shifted since last survey, the pipes from city are old, the wiring is out of date, the standards have changed, the weather got in the way, the supplies changed in price / specification, etc. Everything in the world is like that, software isn't special in that regard. In fact, software only has such complexity because its usually trying to model some real-world data or decision. For the totally arbitrary toy examples, the code is usually predictable, simple, and clean ; the mess starts once we try to fit it to real-world usecases (such as building construction).