This is what Naur, 1985, Programming as Theory Building is about! https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf The act

This is what Naur, 1985, Programming as Theory Building is about! https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf The act of programming is building the theory of what the program does, so that you acquire new knowledge of doing things. It's not just text production. >"[...] not any particular knowledge of facts, but the ability to do certain things, such as to make and appreciate jokes, to talk grammatically, or to fish." Which is why re-building a program from scratch is so tempting: you've figured out the theory as you went along, now you can build the real thing.