“We see documentation as unnecessary, because "talk is cheap, show me the code", but certain forms of knowledge can never be in the code. Knowledge like alternatives considered and rejected, paths explored and then backtracked, features that would be hard to add or trivial and why.”
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“This paper [Naur’s Programming as Theory Building] is so timely in times of LLMs because it gives us a definition for programming that an AI can never do, by definition. A large language model can never form a theory about what it is doing, that simply is not a goal of a language model. An LLM can not (consistently and correctly) answer questions about the code.”
@RuthMalan My problem with Naur‘s paper: It gives two examples, so no real empiric evidence. Also the theory is almost like ghost: impossible to capture or write down. I do like the paper and it explains what I also see in the real world. I just think more research and empirical work would be great. The impact on LLMs would certainly justify it.
@ewolff @RuthMalan So many aspects of SW development would be worth of good empirical study. But sadly, we don’t have the money to do it. But always enough money to fully fuck it up.
