The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

There are many proposals on how to improve the productivity of the individual programmer, as well as groups of programmers. I have already mentioned top-down and bottom-up; there are others, such as head programmer, lead programmer, proving the program is correct in a mathematical sense, and the waterfall model of programming, to name but a few. While each has some merit I have faith in only one, which is almost never mentioned—think before you write the program, it might be called. Before you start, think carefully about the whole thing, including what will be your acceptance test that it is right, as well as how later field maintenance will be done. Getting it right the first time is much better than fixing it up later!