Programming as Theory Building (1985)
The topic of how we as developers implement solutions in code has been on my mind for years.<p>The one insightful idea I found in this essay is that coding is a lossy one-way operation, from which you cannot fully derive the original idea or the &#x27;theory&#x27;. That seems similar to losing information when compiling source code, making it impossible to restore the exact source code from its machine code representation.<p>So if we work backwards, it&#x27;s: machine code (bits) -&gt; source code (text) -&gt; idea&#x2F;solution (human thought?)<p>Despite losing some information, machine and source code have interesting properties, such as being able to copy them easily, transpile to different format, etc.<p>What I&#x27;d like to ask the HN brain is if anyone can think of another way to express a higher level thought other than language? In his essay, Naur implies that there is no such thing. I wonder if we had made any progress on that front in the 35 years that have elapsed since this essay was written.<p>The only thing I can think of is something like UML, which has tons of diagram types for structural and behavioral properties of a system, but I&#x27;ve always found it hard to &#x27;see&#x27; the real idea they&#x27;re trying to describe, in the same way how I find it hard to imagine a 4D object by looking at its 3D projections. With enough effort its certainly doable, but I wouldn&#x27;t say the process is intuitive or easy, so to me, diagrams are like projections of an idea from different points of view, but how do we encode the idea&#x2F;thought&#x2F;theory itself?<p>What is it about language and apprenticeship that makes conveying ideas or theories possible? I view this process as an inefficient way of serializing an idea and transmitting it over voice to another person, who has to unserialize the sounds, convert them to words, then they have to create the associations in their brain based on the meaning of those words, and then probe into the correctness of the associations by asking clarifying questions.<p>Is this really the best we can do in 2020? How are other fields conveying complex abstract notions and ideas?