Fine-grain case studies of scientific inquiry, lessons from linguistics on metaphoric thinking, the epistemology of Charles Sanders Peirce, recent work on architectural image-schemata, along with the computer world's own theorist, Peter Naur, all suggest that software developers (frequently dulled and desiccated from overdosing on 'Cartesian' methodologies) could benefit from imbibing a little mysticism—not the wave-your-hands woo-woo kind but the more ineffable hunch and gut side of human cognition. Scholarly publications in their final polished forms rarely admit that stories, jokes, eroticism, and dreams were the fertile seeds that germinated into 'serious' results. This essay looks to these 'closet' sources, non-reductionist, non-self conscious, metaphorical, and aformal modes of thought as the salvation of a profession gone awry. It is notably proto-scientific image-schemata that retain our attention as a pragmatic tool for improving the fecundity of Agile methodology, at its roots, so to speak. The necessary context is provided by Peter Naur's fundamental insights about software development as 'theory building' coupled with an elaboration of the Agile concept of storytelling.

The discussion starts with and, for reasons of length, mainly stays with architecture's Christopher Alexander who offers novel usages of image-schemata and whose older foundational work will be at least somewhat familiar. The reasoning laid out in the essay, however, is general enough to allow the reader to experiment with proto-scientific clues from any source, not just Alexander.

Syntax definitions are pervasive in modern software systems, and serve as the basis for language processing tools like parsers and compilers. Mainstream parser generators pose restrictions on syntax definitions that follow from their implementation algorithm. They hamper evolution, maintainability, and compositionality of syntax definitions. The pureness and declarativity of syntax definitions is lost. We analyze how these problems arise for different aspects of syntax definitions, discuss their consequences for language engineers, and show how the pure and declarative nature of syntax definitions can be regained.