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I guess it's because I haven't worked on a really massive project with lots of other people, but I've never really needed to "design" software. Sure, sometimes

I guess it's because I haven't worked on a really massive project with lots of other people, but I've never really needed to "design" software. Sure, sometimes I'll stop for a minute to think about the next thing I'm going to write and how it slots into the existing parts, but for the most part my programs grow organically. They start from a small kernel, parts of them grow and are branched off (B-tree style) into new files and subdirectories, and soon enough the whole thing is complete, or at least as complete as I need it to be for the moment. The best experiences I've had programming are with languages and tooling that make this organic growth and splitting process as painless as possible (Rust in particular is really strong in this aspect). Doing such a thing from the top down (as with Java, where you have to be very thorough with your design patterns and UML diagrams and whatnot) seems unnecessarily difficult and restrictive.

restalis 6y ago
Designing from top down may help you a bit when you already have a mental model that you'd wish to convey in written form rather quickly, otherwise risking to loose sight of it when you get into details. UML helped me write down ideas (mostly communication flows and other behavior related aspects, not class diagrams), but I can understand why one may feel restricted when that's not necessary. Growing organically has its benefits for sure (is more fun, at least), but I also had more than one case of reconciling diverging/incompatible parts of a system simply because I went ahead of myself there with improvements on the go. Wasting time on that under deadlines is less fun.