Structured design

What Hacker News says

1. ayewoDec 2022
   Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks is pretty good. There is also the Design of Everyday Things (TDoET) by Don Norman.

   Structured Design from 1975 by Larry L. Constantine and Ed Yourdon is another excellent book that I am currently reading now.

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2. retrocryptidJul 2022
   And don't forget Knuth's "Literate Programming." I didn't agree with every stylistic decision Knuth made, but reading it led me to clarifing some of my own thoughts.

   Let me +1 the previous SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) and Mythical Man Month. I also like DeMarco's PeopleWare. And Loeliger's "Threaded Interpreted Languages." I bought a copy of Doug Kaye's "Loosely Coupled Systems" from bettereorldbooks.com and it looks like it was a library book that should never have been taken out of circulation. It discusses an important aspect of software design that gets little love in the mainstream. I also got a copy of Yourdon's "Structured Design," which was originally released just as OOP was getting big. But... it still contains numerous pearls of wisdom suitable for both OOP and Functional programmers.

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3. SloopJonJan 2016
   I read a lot of computer books after college, many of which Ed wrote, edited, or wrote the foreword for. As a fan of Code Complete and its book recommendations, I suggested that Ed add it to his own list of "cool books." He replied promptly and agreed.

   Although I didn't read it from cover to cover, the chapters I read from a borrowed copy of Structured Design on coupling and cohesion had a big impact on me.

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4. rramadassNov 2025
   FWIK; You can't compare the two. Python is far more general and larger than Prolog which is more specialized. However there have been various extensions to Prolog to make it more general. See Extensions section in Prolog wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog#Extensions Eg. Prolog++ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog%2B%2B to allow one to do large-scale OO programming with Prolog.

   Earlier, Prolog was used in AI/Expert Systems domains. Interestingly it was also used to model Requirements/Structured Analysis/Structured Design and in Prototyping. These usages seems interesting to me since there might be a way to use these techniques today with LLMs to have them generate "correct" code/answers.

   For Prolog and LLMs see - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45712934

   Some old papers/books that i dug up and seem relevant;

   Prototyping analysis, structured analysis, Prolog and prototypes - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/57216.57230

   Prolog and Natural Language Analysis by Fernando C. N. Pereira and Stuart M. Shieber (free digital edition) - http://www.mtome.com/Publications/PNLA/pnla.html

   The Application of Prolog to Structured Design - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220281904_The_Appli...

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5. AlotOfReadingDec 2024
   That's one of many rules in MISRA that originate from antiquated "best practices" from the dark ages that don't actually improve safety. We have it today by way of IEC 61508, which gets it from a book on structured programming called Structured Design. That book didn't recommend banning multiple exit points, but it recommended minimizing them to simplify the control flow graph and said code should minimize the distance between black boxes (bits of code that do something without leaky abstractions and have only one return statement). The IEC authors and MISRA thought the logical extension of that was to make everything have one exit point.
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6. milesjagApr 2024
   Wow - thank you for such a generous response!

   Yeah, I'm agreed on most of the AI stuff - becoming a more architect-shaped engineer is now more important than ever.

   I've been flicking through a copy of https://www.amazon.co.uk/Structured-Design-Fundamentals-Disc... lately to get my brain into gear on this subject.

   Thanks for all the web dev advice and tech callouts. Some real neat examples there which I knew nothing about.

   Regarding niches, I think as a data engineer, becoming fluent in an interactive front-end data-viz library might be the slam dunk that I'm probably looking for.

   Having looked at D3, I am quite impressed! Do you have any experience or knowledge of this lib?

   Again, thank you for sharing :)

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