Peter Naur, "Programming as theory building." (1985)
“…programming properly should be regarded as an activity by which the programmers form or achieve a certain kind of insight, a theory, of the matters at hand. This suggestion is in contrast to what appears to be a more common notion, that programming should be regarded as a production of a program and certain other texts.”
One of them, as I understand it, is that in any significant software project, regardless of the volume and quality of the documentation, or quality of the code base, maintainers not involved in building the original project will not be able to build the "theory" correctly in their minds, and will consequently make changes that are clumsy or detrimental. (I'm summarizing, so some important aspects have been skipped).
I see this aspect of the paper as related to the "conceptual integrity" discussed in the Mythical Man-Month.
This paper has long been one of my favorites, and was first brought to my attention when I was reading (IIRC) one of Alistair Cockburn's books. Sadly, few of the people I shared it with found it interesting.
“…programming properly should be regarded as an activity by which the programmers form or achieve a certain kind of insight, a theory, of the matters at hand. This suggestion is in contrast to what appears to be a more common notion, that programming should be regarded as a production of a program and certain other texts.”
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491661