Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Got a source for this? Because it’s brilliant.



Seems like a similar thought to "Programming as Theory Building"[1].

The paper is well worth reading, but the TL;DR if you don't wanna: the "theory" of a program (how does it fit together? What extensions/modifications would work well, how should it evolve to handle new cases, etc.) is contained only in the mind of the coder; documentation, spoken explanations, etc. are attempts at describing that theory, but they are necessarily a lossy encoding of it. Certainly attrishing everyone who knows something about a codebase would be extremely foolish under Naur's argument.

Debt, I guess to me, is code deviating from a known better theory for it to follow.

[1]: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf


The "attrishing" in your comment made me go looking, and Wiktionary [0] says the verb form "attrit(e)" exists and is likely a quite old backformation that has fallen out of common use.

[0] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/attrit


I wouldn't quite say attrite has fallen out of common use, though it is by its nature rarely encountered. I certainly use it, and it's fairly common in certain fields (e.g. discussions of language attrition, ironically).


Such an excellent paper.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: