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.
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| Original publisher | Paul Graham — Essays |
| Canonical URL | http://www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html |
| Publication time | Not provided by source |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T08:49:07.854Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T08:49:32.351Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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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.