[robitor]

Naur argues that this view is contrary to the mainstream approach to software development, is that true? Does Google, Facebook, etc... view software development as: "similar to industrial production, the programmer being regarded as a component of that production, a component that has to be controlled by rules of procedure and which can be replaced easily"?

[conistonwater]

I'm not sure whether his mainstream is similar to today's mainstream, but I think he talks about this distinction between TheoryBuilding and "industrial production" specifically in the "Method and Theory Building" section.

If I understood correctly, TheoryBuilding is rather independent of method — TheoryBuilding is what a programmer would ultimately have to do to succeed, regardless of the exact steps they are asked to take. The exact method they follow is irrelevant in comparison.

I'm not sure mainstream still means the same thing he's talking about, but even in your example of "industrial production", I don't think it's that clear that that contradicts him. He seems to be just saying that whatever that means, it's not enough to fully describe software development. But perhaps competent engineers would end up doing so anyway — in fact, if they follow a similar set of ideas that they carry with them from project to project, they would then have a theory of other people's software that they didn't build themselves, just from being in the same environment.

On the other hand, he does directly say that under the TheoryBuildingView, when the theory of a program is lost, from people being replaced too much, it is really lost, and it is very expensive to reconstruct it. So it really depends on the details of how exactly that "component-based production" works out in practice.

[Note: maybe I misunderstood the paper or something, don't trust me.]

[hex13]

I don't know what happens in Google, Facebook etc. but one thing I know - there are not mainstream companies. They are just big and successful. Mainstream companies are rather all these small and medium IT firms that make Wordpress based sites (for example).

I think many IT firms nowadays have exactly this kind of approach: programmer has to deliver code according to specifications created by designers and stakeholders. Nobody cares what programmer knows and what theory programmer is building - the most important thing is to bring hot new features and to do it quickly.

Off course one can argue that "features", "stories" or "backlog" are needed from business point of view. Okay. But how to construct theory if there is no time for thinking?

[quonn]

This is from 1985. Things have certainly changed.

[hex13]

nothing changes. I read some time ago Dijkstra article from 1972(!) called "The Humble Programmer" and what he wrote describes perfectly programming in 2015 as well (maybe he had Time Machine? Who knows...).

[HerpDerpLerp]

And here it is (for the lazy ;)

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340...