Peter Naur - yes, the one behind the Backus-Naur Form - wrote an excellent article about software development in 1985, entitled "Programming as Theory Building". It came to me, when I was readin Alistair Cocburn's book on Agile. A.Cockburn praises it, and for a reason. The article offers a great analogy for the craft of Software Development. More than an analogy, Theory Building is a relatively well studied process, developed through the centuries of philosophical thought, starting from Aristotel, and up to modern positivism, and neo-whatever.
To a practitioner's mind the Philosophy is generally an entangled mess of terms, and definitions - a useless babble as they often say. But software developers should know better, as too often they reject other people ideas expressed in code just to reinvent the wheel - the Not-Invented-Here syndrome. That is philosophers are just other third-party library developers. Only their language is human, and their platform is life.
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