Why the semantic level?

For some reason I seem to have gotten off onto a philosophical tangent while walking the dog this evening, with the resulting epiphany: programming is a process of comprehension. And then documentation of that comprehension.

Back in the day, I spent several years working on two large systems (and here and there some other stuff, but the bulk of my programming work was on two systems). The first was a pharmaceutical document management system, and the second was a searchable online machine tool database. The first was for a corporate gig, obviously - pharmaceuticals are not something done in the garage by a startup - and so it was relatively well-managed and the technical debt was relatively well controlled.

The second was a startup, I was the technical lead and entire staff, and over the course of some dozen years I managed to run up a significant technical debt. Due to that debt, working on the system became an increasingly painful chore (every attempt to address one issue simply reminded me of the dozen related issues that were not going to be fixed because the customer had a very limited budget).

The process of leaving that situation and moving to technical translation took many years, and something in me fought it every step of the way. It was the last paid programming I ever did. Since that time, I've been a hanger-on in the startup programming community, but nothing ever gets off the ground, essentially because I have a fear of technical debt.

But why do we have technical debt? I'll tell you: because we commit to specific platforms and solutions during the programming process, and it is very difficult to undo those early decisions later. By programming at the syntactic level (some of which is of course unavoidable) we lock ourselves into low-level structure we can't easily back out of.

Addressing things at the semantic level - were it possible with existing tools - would avoid at least some of that technical debt. If we have semantic structure - if we are defining not software but the concepts behind the software - then the programming itself starts to look more like a compilation process. And just as we can recompile most code onto a new platform (maybe after fiddling with some flags and libraries), we could back out of syntactic-level, stack-level decisions by "recompiling" a set of concepts on a new platform.

Indeed, in a sense a new set of requirements would be a sort of recompilation.

It's a vague ideal, but this is essentially what I see as the promise of semantic-level programming. I earnestly hope I'll be able to make some forward progress on this over the next year.