Agreed. Make a guess, then verify that guess with running code, repeat. I'm surprised this is controversial; engineering ostensibly follows the scientific meth

Agreed. Make a guess, then verify that guess with running code, repeat. I'm surprised this is controversial; engineering ostensibly follows the scientific method. Without forming hypotheses and testing them, there is no scientific method. Unless we want to nitpick the difference between guessing and hypothesizing, making guesses is a critical part of programming. I always come back to Peter Naur’s essay "Programming as Theory Building". It's 40 years old now but still nails the essence of programming. The value produced by programming is a shared working theory of the system, not the source code itself. I can't see how you would develop a sufficient theory without first forming hypotheses.