onlurking

Programming as Theory Building

Peter Naur

Peter Naur's classic 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building" argues that a program is not its source code. A program is a shared mental construct (he uses the word theory) that lives in the minds of the people who work on it. If you lose the people, you lose the program. The code is merely a written representation of the program, and it's lossy, so you can't reconstruct

Kartones

PSQL

Magic words:

psql -U postgres

Some interesting flags (to see all, use -h or --help depending on your psql version):

• -E: will describe the underlaying queries of the \ commands (cool for learning!)
• -l: psql will list all databases and then exit (useful if the user you connect with doesn't has a default database, like at AWS RDS)