Peter Naur's view of programming

And yet the current title ("Peter Naur's view of programming") now contains even less information about the content of the article. It may be less "clickbaity" -- I certainly am less inclined to click on it, but it's also less useful.

Hah, nice try, but no. Arguing that something is a liability if it fell into the wrong hands does not mean it is worthless or worth less than zero. It simply means it is worth protecting.

I feel like the Unix philosophy of very small programs that do one thing, and do it well, is an application of the concepts in this article.

> One of Naur’s main conclusions is that making changes to an existing program (to accommodate changing requirements) is often more costly than writing new code from scratch, at least if done by people from a different team. This is because there are intangible aspects of the model/theory in the programmer’s heads, which can’t be expressed in code and documentation:

Small, single purpose applications require less maintenance (which is expensive), but proper design allows them to be combined to create more complicated programs.

This fits nicely with some ideas I've been working on about "Tribal Knowledge". It's going to take some thought to integrate fully. I am primarily looking at the work of Ong on orality and the distinctions he draws between oral and literal cultures.

It's not uncommon to hear the phrase used as a pejorative, with the implicit assumption that oral culture is inferior to literate culture and that tribalism == primitivism == bad and undesirable.

But I've come to believe that there are always going to be things that cannot or should not be represented in written documentation. Documentation is an artifact that must be maintained. Individual professionals and organizations spend a huge amount of energy producing, managing, and maintaining written documentation.

But how much time have we spent on oral transmission of ideas? Almost none. And that's because we dismiss it as an approach. It's seen as less than or primitive, or at best something to discourage.

But if you accept that there must always be some oral information, then ignoring the issues of how we communicate, update, and persist that orally transmitted information seems foolish. There are cultures that have more recently made the the transition from being primarily oral to literal that have not forgotten the skills needed to manage this class of knowledge.

I wonder what practices we can learn from them that we can use to improve our ability to share and communicate more effectively.