An attempt at applying ideas from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to programming

One of the books Peter Naur cites in his Programming as Theory Building essay is Thomas S. Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. This book seems to be regarded as an important entry under the topic of history of science, but what does this have to do with programming? Kuhn’s book sounded interesting so I read it to find out, and in this post I’ll make an attempt at applying what the book is about into programming, and hopefully we can also find some value from doing so. Basic ideas from Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Structure of Scientific Revolutions tries to describe what science really is. Kuhn suggests that how we typically see science, and how we learn about science, misleads us into thinking that science, and scientific progress in particular, functions in a certain way, when it in fact works very differently. We typically think that science is a linear and cumulative process, where one discovery leads to the next, which leads to another, and so on.…