[akavel]

The basic notion of program as theory fits into what I personally stumbled upon recently on my own. Notably, expanding on it, I like to see every execution of a program as an Experiment - in that it may support or invalidate the Theory (by manifesting bugs/undesired behaviors). I'm happy to see I'm not the first one to think of this idea. However, I am not necessarily convinced by the main claim the article seems to make based on it, that the Theory cannot be resurrected from the code of the program + documentation. I think it may be very hard, and depend a lot on many factors (quality of code, docs, the resurrecting team, their time, and as suggested, access to the domain where the program is used), but it may still be possible to a huge extent. I believe some sentences used by the author actually provide hints in support of this claim. Also, in other sciences like math or physics, albeit not easily, knowledge/theory transfer through writing can be done, or at least helped significantly.