by throwaway808404
0 subcomment
- I'm surprised no one has already mentioned this, but this idea has been expressed before in Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" (1985): he argues that a program can’t be reduced to its source text; it’s a theory shared by the programmers. When the original team is gone, maintainers must rebuild that theory (often painfully) from the remaining traces.
https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
Not to say the article doesn't have value, as great foundational ideas are always worth repeating and revisiting.
by svilen_dobrev
2 subcomments
- "product is the knowledge in the code, not the code itself".. and other interesting observations. That might be relevant in current to-AI-or-not-AI questions
Published as book - The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software , 2003, Phillip G. Armour
https://www.amazon.com/Laws-Software-Process-Production-Mana...
by random_duck
0 subcomment
- Funny how something written in 2000 can sound so modern.
- The intro is really good and stands alone. I'd point any outsider to this as a decent description of hacking, programming, software engineering, prototyping in general.
- This would be so useful of a model, in personal development, life and more! Incredible take on this.
- >As a development life-cycle model, prototyping acknowledges that our job is not to build a system, but to acquire knowledge.
So if there is any hope in making software development faster, we need to focus more on the specification part - to get it right faster.
- > the real job is not writing the code, or even building the system — it is acquiring the necessary knowledge to build the system.
Not only very true, but the grammar will trigger those who insist on forcing the "that's written by AI" meme. I love it.
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