The chemists are already here, the Knuths and such - it's just being ignored or isn't directly "relevant" yet.
It's like building buildings without "building science" - which, surprisingly, we have actually been doing in many ways to the current date.
There aren't really formal schools of "be a carpenter and build a house" - it's all very master/apprentice even if it is not formally so everywhere. And since things like "energy usage" of the building didn't really matter until recently, many buildings just kept being built the way they always have.
Now things like "can we keep this building comfortable at much less energy usage with some additional up-front costs" are coming to the forefront, and how buildings are built is slowly changing.
Compared to that, software is very in its infancy, because the real only bottom line items are "does it mostly work" and "did it not cost infinity dollars more than it made".
It's not in its infancy. The fundamental problems regarding algorithms and data structures, OS theory and formal language theory are well understood and have articles on Wikipedia. We know Amdahl's law, the CAP theorem and the ABA problem.
The problem is the explosive decentralised development of tools, languages and frameworks under a hyper-competitive neoliberal economic system. Someone invents a language to lock programmers to their platform. Another programmer creates a tool to transpile that language to their half-assed dialect of another language. This leads to a huge problem of entropy and inefficiencies at all levels.
It's a term thrown around by various people to refer to "building houses with something slightly later than 1950s designs".
When people hear "civil engineering" they think "skyscrapers, bridges, roads" - this is more like "if you wrap a house in insulation, it's insulated better, but that can also cause moisture capture, which destroys it" type engineering.
It's like building buildings without "building science" - which, surprisingly, we have actually been doing in many ways to the current date.
There aren't really formal schools of "be a carpenter and build a house" - it's all very master/apprentice even if it is not formally so everywhere. And since things like "energy usage" of the building didn't really matter until recently, many buildings just kept being built the way they always have.
Now things like "can we keep this building comfortable at much less energy usage with some additional up-front costs" are coming to the forefront, and how buildings are built is slowly changing.
Compared to that, software is very in its infancy, because the real only bottom line items are "does it mostly work" and "did it not cost infinity dollars more than it made".