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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

Peter Naur's paper 'Programming as theory building' is perhaps the most lucid, thought provoking and practically usefull single thing I have ever read on the sociological aspects of software engineering. Right there with the Brook's "Mythical man month" ( but the value density of the former is much higher, since it's a paper and the latter is a book).

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Link to the paper: http://www.dc.uba.ar/materias/plp/cursos/material/programmin...

Briefly looking at the paper, it seems what he calls the "theory of the program" is akin to what Fred Brooks called "conceptual integrity". Am I wrong?

I think that's right. The terms 'design' and 'model' are often used for this nowadays. Naur's point is that a program is a shared mental construct that lives in the minds of the people who build it. The source code is not the program. It's the canonical written representation, but a lossy one.

It also has a lot of overlap with the concept of "tacit knowledge": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

The programmer is unable to completely and unambiguously articulate the "design" in source code and documentation. Yes, the source code can be improved with with longer names of variables and functions in addition to liberal code comments. And documentation can be expanded to include chapters on "architectural overview" and "technical motivations" to help fill the gaps but it will inevitably be incomplete.

UBA is a University in Argentina. Happy to see they include it in their curriculum :)

I agree. Years if not decades ahead of its time.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=programming%20as%20theory%20bu...

Peter Naur was editor of the Algol 60 report, and with foresight, cunning, and a bit of trickery, he is responsible for getting recursion into a mainstream programming language. https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-...

Ha, another work I get to know by its author's death ... sigh. Obiwan's quote get boring.

Which quote's that?

"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

^ Is the one that comes to mind? Or maybe

"[...] I'm getting too old for this sort of thing."

"An elegant weapon... for a more civilized age."

Actually now that I think about it, I really don't know what the parent was referring to.

I was thinking "Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time."

It fits. With both Murdock and Naur, both of them were names I was familiar with but hadn't heard anything about for quite a while... until I heard they both died.

mattlutze's first one. The fact that passing away spread his influence even more. Even though the 'name I havent heard in a long time' could also fit.

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