I read Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and thought it quite good. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.p

I read Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and thought it quite good. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf At the time I found it I was was working where the key challenge was not so much technical as much as ensuring that simple technology, spread across a large breadth of functionality, adhered to a consistent vision of the business domain that was being implemented. The program became an implementation of the mental model I developed of the business domain itself: its purpose, its uses, and its allowances and prohibitions. The Naur paper hit exactly not only on what I had been implementing in code, but on what other developers would have to know in order to maintain that code over time.... and had the kind of knowledge that had been lost over the life of application by the time I came to be involved.... and part of why my project existed.