Talk:Top-down programming

This article has been vastly improved. I suggest that it is time to remove the 'Computer stubs' tag and perhaps to remove the cleanup tag. If anyone opposes these actions, please specifically request further changes. I hereby offer my help, but please consider that I am naturally a bottom-up type. Chris the speller 18:03, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

After further investigation, I suggest merging this with Top-down, which covers design in both directions. Chris the speller 18:17, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

This article is wrong
Top-down programming was an early form of incremental development orginated by Harlan Mills.

It is an implementation technique, not a design technique. It involves building a early running version of a system that fullfills part of the system requirements before the whole system is designed in detail. Unfinished parts of the system would have their interfaces to the partially completed system defined as black boxes. The discovery (in the 1960's) that all computer programs could have a hierarchial structure led Mills to discover that this black-box technique was possible.

Mills was relatively flexible about the design process, but he thought that top-down development (or programming) was essential to the success in the development of production systems.

See "Structured Programming in a Production Environment" by FT Baker

See the introduction of Harlan Mills book "Software Productivity" for a dicussion of the fact that his term "top-down" was misunderstood.


 * This is not a very helpfull remark. I agree that the article is not completely accurate but it does focus on the implementation/programming part of the software development process. Also, I, and probably more, do not have the references you list; an excerpt would be helpfull.
 * However, the article is not very encyclopedic. If nobody objects during a couple of weeks I suggest that the article is replaced by a redirect to Top-down and bottom-up design since it contains for the most part all relevant information. Frodet 19:20, 13 December 2005 (UTC)