202501301705 Programming as Theory Building

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Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur is an amazing, thoughtful, penetrating understanding and description of the act of programming. It suggests that the act of programming is an act of theory building. This contradicts with the common view of programming as industrial production (e.g. queues, assembly lines, lean, scrum etc.)

[P]rogramming properly should be regarded as an activity by which the programmers form or achieve a certain kind of insight, a theory, of the matters at hand. This suggestion is in contrast to the what appears to be a more common notion, that programming should be regarded as a production of a program and certain other texts.¹

• quality is related to understanding 393
• theory as technical term (what is a "theory") 395, 396 w/ links to Bloom's taxonomies.
• intellectual activity vs intelligent behavior 396 (maybe)
• Similar to Hamming's 202207271530 Expertise is required to create useful simulations which is a statement about modeling some real-world process and the requirement of a deep theory of how that works in order to produce a useful simulacra.

the continued adaptation, modification, and correction of errors in [programs], is essentially dependent on a certain kind of knowledge possessed by a group of programmers who are closely and continuously connected with them.¹