If by "understanding a program" one means holding the entire representation in
internal memory (short or long) at once, then I concede that one can never understand
a program; by similar reasoning, one can never understand history, medicine, or
psychology either. The use of some kind of external representation is essential to
understanding programs.
It is probably also the case that programmers never understand even moderate sized
programs entirely, even using an external representation, unless they are required to
do so by a laboratory experiment. For many real-world tasks, they can, in fact, get
by with a trivial, local understand of the code, just as it is unnecessary for a
physician to use knowledge of
the biochemistry of microorganisms to decide to what to prescribe when you show up
with the
symptoms of the flu that's been going around.
Neither of these points are relevant to the issue of whether programming requires
knowledge of
global schemas/plans or whether they can just get by with very local transformation
rules.
I think the lack of success in constructing "automatic programming" systems and the
large role
that skill and experience play in programmer performance are strong arguments for the
deeper knowledge.
Ruven Brooks
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