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> lacking the necessary information, may either come up with a suboptimal solution or need further communication with the original architect.

> Others might advocate for better design diagrams and documentation to capture all the relevant information.

    During the design phase group B made suggestions for the manner in which the extensions
    should be accommodated and submitted them to group A for review. In several major cases
    it turned out that the solutions suggested by group B were found by group A to make no
    use of the facilities that were not only inherent in the structure of the existing
    compiler but were discussed at length in its documentation, and to be based instead on
    additions to that structure in the form of patches that effectively destroyed its power
    and simplicity. [...] This is an example of how the full program text and additional
    documentation is insufficient in conveying to even the highly motivated group B the
    deeper insight into the design, that theory which is immediately present to the members
    of group A. [...] A very important consequence of the Theory Building View is that
    program revival, that is reestablishing the theory of a program merely from the
    documentation, is strictly impossible. [0]
[0] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf



Very interesting, thanks for sharing. There have been multiple discussions on this text here before, but I seem to have missed them all :)




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