The paper's conclusion is stronger: a new person on a still existing team is rebuilding the theory. Albeit much quicker and with much higher confidence, since they can talk to the existing devs and learn directly from them, but they're still having to build their own theory, separate from the original. (As we don't have SFTP between brains, yet.)
> A very important consequence of the Theory Building View is that program revival, that is reestablishing the theory of a program merely from the documentation, is strictly impossible
> […]
> Similar problems are likely to arise even when a program is kept continuously alive by an evolving team of programmers, as a result of the differences of competence and background experience of the individual programmers, particularly as the team is being kept operational by inevitable replacements of the individual members.
Reading documentation & talking to the original dev are inherently the same thing: we're using some medium (written docs, spoken word) to attempt to convey information.
> A very important consequence of the Theory Building View is that program revival, that is reestablishing the theory of a program merely from the documentation, is strictly impossible
> […]
> Similar problems are likely to arise even when a program is kept continuously alive by an evolving team of programmers, as a result of the differences of competence and background experience of the individual programmers, particularly as the team is being kept operational by inevitable replacements of the individual members.
Reading documentation & talking to the original dev are inherently the same thing: we're using some medium (written docs, spoken word) to attempt to convey information.