Peter Naur — Programming as Theory Building

Computer Science Off Course, Season 1 Episode 1. Hosts: Felienne Hermans and Hanna Schraffenberger. Published 2026-07-07, running time 40:54.

Episode notes (verbatim from rss.com show page)

What is programming? This week, we take a stab at this fundamental question with Peter Naur's paper "Programming as Theory Building". Felienne has read the paper (more than once), and Hanna is asking her questions about it. Apparently, programming is more than just solving problems by writing code and involves theory building! Listen in to hear more about what this theory building entails (spoiler alert: it has something to do with being able to explain and defend the solutions we come up with), some beautiful quotes from the paper, and Felienne's ideas of what Naur's argument means for current AI practices, LLM usage, and the computer science curriculum. Read the paper, do the homework, or skip the homework and listen to Hanna's homework attempt instead.

Keywords: Computer Science, Education, University, Interdisciplinary, Books, Articles, Homework, Perspectives.

The "Links" section of the show notes was truncated behind a "Read more" control and could not be retrieved.

Lobsters discussion

Submitted to Lobsters at https://lobste.rs/s/oqwjp5/computer_science_off_course_programming The comment thread could not be fetched during ingest — lobste.rs timed out on every request from the ingest environment (connection refused/timeout, HTTP 000). Left as a pointer for manual backup.

Ingest note

The episode is a discussion-format restatement of Peter Naur's 1985 essay, framed for a computer-science-education audience, with the hosts extending it to current AI/LLM practice and the CS curriculum. The operational gloss offered — theory building is being able to explain and defend the solution — matches Naur's own account already captured in the wiki. No new claim, quote, or framing beyond what programming-as-theory-building and programming-as-theory-building-codeutopia already cover was recoverable from the available material, so no new wiki page was created. Kept as a source record and a cross-reference pointer.