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Essay on Introduction to Programming Theory
One of the failures of the computer age has been the failure of those who teach programming and those who teach writing to realize that the skills they are teaching have a great deal in common. Early recognition of this fact was seen at least a decade ago in Kernighan and Plauger (1974) The Elements of Programming Style, which took its form from the similarly named popular writing guide. Only a few writers have acknowledged the link since that time, among them Schneider (1984) who diagnoses faults in a piece of written documentation in terms of commonly found programming errors.
The fundamental similarity of these processes lies in their common origin, a need to communicate. Both of them involve the communicating of an idea which you understand to someone (or something) who does not understand. In this way programming is most like descriptive writing, particularly the description of some process, but the principles of clarity, sequence, and organization apply to both programming and most forms of prose.
One should not, however, get the impression that writing and programming are identical, for that is obviously not the case. The most important difference may be that the writer can assume a much greater degree of flexibility on the part of the intended audience than can the programmer. That is, the programmer is usually working with a relatively limited number of words and basic structures which have been predefined, and any additions to this list must be explicitly defined by the programmer. Thus, the programmer can create new words, if they are defined, but is not allowed to use nouns as verbs (to interface), or verbs as nouns (an intercept) as we do when writing or speaking. 1
The similarities between programming and writing are usually not seen because the accepted definition of programming, or more precisely, the interpretation of the definition, is narrow. The New Webster's Computer Dictionary (1984) defines programming as "the process of converting a problem specification into a sequence of instructions to be executed by a computer"....
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