Back in the mid-1980s PC world, it would have been hard to avoid at least one of the many competing One True Ways. But the majority of what became my personal

Back in the mid-1980s PC world, it would have been hard to avoid at least one of the many competing One True Ways. But the majority of what became my personal ideas of good design came from Phil Burns of Northwestern University, who posted the sources for commercial-grade programs as freeware. Pib's style was probably evolved from his time teaching programming, and was seriously old-school even then. A) define the problem set B) outline a solution set C) break the solution down into logical, preferably standalone or reuseable, modules D) write detailed interfaces between every module E) wrap it all in a main execution loop This not only broke what might be an overwhelmingly complex program into smaller pieces, but was practically a self-hosting test framework to start with. And being highly modular, it was suited for splitting modules across different programmers. I've watched many-many styles go by since then, but what I learned from Pib and NWU has always worked well for me, even when programs evolved to where most of my actual "programming" was just calling outside APIs, frameworks, or classes.