For me there is an ebb and flow between Maths (theory) and practice. Humans have long been able to achieve things with loose and intuitive understanding of what

For me there is an ebb and flow between Maths (theory) and practice. Humans have long been able to achieve things with loose and intuitive understanding of what they're doing - this usually outpaces theory for a long time while theory struggles to catch up but once it does it tends to unlock a lot more new and interesting things. You can choose examples like "sun rises in the east" or "things fall down to the ground" or even things like fire to see how we were long able to do useful things before having a deep fundamental understanding of what they were. And while trying to understand them, we had a whole bunch of wrong ideas along the way all while the practitioners got on with their lives. We also see this in physiological spaces like sports and health. Just the other day I watched a video about how Chopin had some deep intuitive understandings about the anatomy of the hand that was contrarian to his peers but proved to be far ahead of his time. With programming we have a lot of different theory to dip into: information theory, computer science, systems theory, category theory etc. some of these ideas have been slowly chugging along in academia but the early days of computing were built with dirty for loops, goto and hand crafted assembly or even less. We still managed to put people on the moon with that nevertheless and automated a bunch of commerce and put stuff on the internet - long before most devs had heard of an ML type system But the ideas from Scheme gave us Ruby Python and JS which unlocked a whole new wave of programming and arguably made it accessible to more people increasing humanity's "productivity" in some sense. I'm sure people who believe in static typing would disagree but YouTube, Instagram and Github were built in these dynamic languages...