Yes, he says this pretty explicitly in the essay. Some relevant excerpts: "Programming in this sense primarily must be the programmers' building up of knowled

Yes, he says this pretty explicitly in the essay. Some relevant excerpts: "Programming in this sense primarily must be the programmers' building up of knowledge of a certain kind, knowledge taken to be basically the programmers' immediate posession, any documentation being an auxiliary, secondary product." (emphasis mine) "The death of a program happens when the programmer team possessing its theory is dissolved. A dead program may continue to be used for execution in a computer and to produce useful results. The actual state of death becomes visible when demands for modifications of the program cannot be intelligently answered."