
Program Development by Stepwise Refinement (1971) - theastrowolfe
http://sunnyday.mit.edu/16.355/wirth-refinement.html
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Jtsummers
[http://sunnyday.mit.edu/16.355/](http://sunnyday.mit.edu/16.355/)

The full list of readings for the course is interesting as well.

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imglorp
This methodology is what we were taught, in pascal, as our 101 CS course
around 1986. The hardest part of teaching it was actually explaining the
syntax to first time thinkers. The abstractions were easier.

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phkamp
Too bad they didn't give an edgy name like "agile" or "scrum"...

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Jtsummers
Your comment was meant in jest, but I believe this article was written in the
context of the push for "structured programming". The "structured" in that was
selected for a reason: What business wants to say that it's making
_unstructured_ programs? It sounds chaotic, unmaintainable, and like a ticking
time bomb. So the people responsible for pushing the ideas of structured
programming selected a name that made it hard to argue against.

EDIT: Double checked the date of the original article, it was 1971. Right in
the middle of the Structured Programming push by Dijkstra and others (who is
cited in the article).

