[deathanatos]

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

[frogulis]

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

[troad]

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).

[heenrik]

Such an excellent paper.