It seems to me that one consequence of the "Theory Building View" is that: instead of focusing on delivering the artifact or the documentation of said artifact, one should instead focus on documenting how the artifact can be re-implemented by somebody else. Or in other words optimise for "revival" of a "dead" programs.

This seems especially relevant in open source, or in blog posts / papers, where we rarely have teams which continuously transfer theories to newcomers. Focusing on documenting "how it works under the hood" and helping others re-implement your ideas also seems more useful to break silos between programming language communities.

For example a blog post that introduces some library in some programming language and only explains how to use its API to solve some concrete problems is of little use to programmers that use other programming languages, compared to a post which would explain how the library works on a level where other programmers could build a theory and re-implement it themselves in their language of choice.

I also feel like there's a connection between the "Theory Building View" and the people that encourage rewriting your software. For example in the following interview[0] Joe Armstrong explains that he often wrote a piece of code and the next day he threw it away and rewrote it from scratch. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that after your first iteration, you've a better theory and therefore in a better position to implement it in a better way?

I also believe there's some connection to program size here. In the early days of Erlang it was possible to do a total rewrite of the whole language in less than a week. New language features were added in one work session, if you couldn’t get the idea out of your brain and code it up in that time then you didn’t do it, Joe explained[1] (17:10).

In a later talk[2] he elaborated saying:

“We need to break systems down into small understandable components with message passing between them and with contracts describing whats going on between them so we can understand them, otherwise we just won’t be able to make software that works. I think the limit of human understandability is something like 128KB of code in any language. So we really need to box things down into small units of computation and formally verify them and the protocols in particular.”

I found the 128KB interesting. It reminds me of Forth here you are forced to fit your code in blocks (1024 chars or 16 lines on 64 characters).

Speaking of Forth, Chuck Moore also appears to be a rewriter. He said[3] something in similar:

“Instead of being rewritten, software has features added. And becomes more complex. So complex that no one dares change it, or improve it, for fear of unintended consequences. But adding to it seems relatively safe. We need dedicated programmers who commit their careers to single applications. Rewriting them over and over until they’re perfect.” (2009)

Chuck re-implemented the his Forth many times, in fact Forth’s design seems to be centered around being easily re-implementable on new hardware (this was back when new CPUs had new instruction sets). Another example is Chuck’s OKAD, VLSI design tools, to which he comments:

“I’ve spent more time with it that any other; have re-written it multiple times; and carried it to a satisfying level of maturity.”

Something I’m curious about is: what would tools and processes that encourage the "Theory Building View" look like?

[0]: https://vimeo.com/1344065#t=8m30s

[1]: https://dl.acm.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1145%2F1...

[2]: https://youtu.be/rQIE22e0cW8?t=3492

[3]: https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/opinion/geek-of-the-wee...