Programming Bottom-Up
1993 (This essay is from the introduction to On Lisp.) It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large. If some component of a program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as easily as a big city conceals fugitives. Such software will be hard to read, hard to test, and hard to debug.In accordance with this principle, a large program must be divided into pieces, and the larger the program, the more it must be divided.
- ▪1993 (This essay is from the introduction to On Lisp.) It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large.
- ▪If some component of a program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as easily as a big city conceals fugitives.
- ▪Such software will be hard to read, hard to test, and hard to debug.In accordance with this principle, a large program must be divided into pieces, and the larger the program, the more it must be divided.
Paul Graham — Essays files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 219 of its stories.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
1993 (This essay is from the introduction to On Lisp.) It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large. If some component of a program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as easily as a big city conceals fugitives. Such software will be hard to read, hard to test, and hard to debug.In accordance with this principle, a large program must be divided into pieces, and the larger the program, the more it must be divided. How do you divide a program? The traditional approach is called top-down design: you say "the purpose of the program is to do these seven things, so I divide it into seven major subroutines.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Paul Graham — Essays.