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I disagree with “code can be thought of as formal requirements” - perhaps if you twist the meaning of the word requirement, yes.

This analogy puts us into a place where we mix intent and implementation and make them the same. It doesn’t allow for bugs in a sense.

This is why I dislike analogous thinking!

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I was thinking requirements in the sense of «tell don’t ask». And I reslly believe that if we can define intent as implementation (on a high level of course) we have solved many problems. For example if you want to sort transactions by time in a accounting system you should only have to ask for a sorted collection ( sort(transactions)) and not worry about what way the data is sorted. Then the people developing the library for sorting will be able to optimize the implementation independently. This is something we do today, but I think this concept can be taken a lot further if we think of avstracting even higher. At the same time I think this requires rigor and extremely well defined boundaries between layers, so we dont end up with a mess like java null pointers.

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