202501301705 Programming as Theory Building

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)