Talk:Why software is different

There's been an idea rattling in the back of my mind that software is different because the computer (instructions and storage) are known before the invention exists. Any combination of these instructions and data sets would be obvious to a person skilled in the art, say, a computer programmer, when faced with the problem to be solved by the alleged computer-related invention. Therefore any computer program isn't unpatentable by virtue of exclusion, but by virtue of lacking an inventive step.

Why this is different to physics, biology, engineering or chemistry will depend on the field. Engineers need to build mechanical parts, as do physicists. Chemists rely on reaction probabilities and have a huge degree of uncertainty as to whether the reagents do what they say, as also is the case with biological inventions. There's the Heisenberg Limit to these kinds of invention which simply does not exist when a set of known instructions manipulate a set of known data. That's how software is different.