Paradigms Without Progress: Kuhnian Reflections on Programming Practice

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Argues that programming exemplars like Smalltalk, Lisp and C function as Kuhnian exemplars but paradigms rarely “win,” so debates persist because of incommensurability between values and vocabularies; adopts Peter Naur’s claim that programming is theory building, treating codebases as embodied theories and large rewrites as rewrites as paradigm shifts that create lossy translations; surveys philosophical roots (Turing, Russell, Carnap) and urges work on historical methods, conceptual engineering and a clearer theory of abstraction.

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" chapters (29)

1. 0:00PARADIGMS WITHOUT PROGRESS Kuhnian Reflections on Programming Practice
2. 0:31INTERMINABLE DEBATES
3. 1:40THE PARADIGMS OF PROGRAMMING Robert W. Floyd (1978)
4. 1:54THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS Thomas S. Kuhn (1962)
5. 2:18ARE PROGRAMMING PARADIGMS KUHNIAN PARADIGMS?
6. 2:44WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM PHILOSOPHY?
7. 4:29THE MARCH OF PROGRESS
8. 5:07HOW SCIENCE REALLY PROGRESSES
9. 7:08NORMAL SCIENCE
10. 9:36CRISIS
11. 11:26BREAKING DOWN A PARADIGM
12. 14:34It became the exemplar of the new computing, in part, because we were actually trying for a qualitative shift in belief structures - a new Kuhnian paradigm...
13. 15:38INCOMMENSURABILITY
14. 15:58HAVING NO COMMON MEASURE
15. 17:00No neutral algorithm for theory choice, no systematic decision procedure which... must lead each individual in the group to the same decision.
16. 17:42DIFFICULTIES COMMUNICATING
17. 18:34WEIRD ENTITIES OF THE PAST • Phlogiston • Corpuscle
18. 22:16PRE-PARADIGM
19. 23:03MATHEMATIZED COMPUTER SCIENCE Tomas Petricek (2016)
20. 23:53FINDING PARADIGMS IN PROGRAMMING
21. 24:15PROGRAMMING AS THEORY BUILDING Peter Naur (1985)
22. 24:52We will misunderstand the difficulties that arise and our attempts to overcome them will give rise to conflicts and frustrations.
23. 26:05A main claim of the Theory Building View of programming is that an essential part of any program, the theory of it, is something that could not conceivably be expressed, but is inextricably bound to human beings
24. 26:38THE CONCEPT OF MIND Gilbert Ryle (1949)
25. 27:08To be a Newtonian was not just to say what Newton had said, but also to say and do what Newton would have said and done.
26. 28:59REWRITES AS PARADIGM SHIFTS
27. 31:43INFLUENCES
28. 36:48PATTERNS OF INTENTION Michael Baxandall (1987)
29. 40:08ABSTRACTION • Implementation as Semantic Interpretation - William J. Rapaport Making Things Up - Karen Bennett

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