There’s an interesting thread of truth in this, and you’ve touched on it. Paul always goes top down fist, and bottom up second. I don’t think he explained that

There’s an interesting thread of truth in this, and you’ve touched on it. Paul always goes top down fist, and bottom up second. I don’t think he explained that very well. Doing bottom-up first is fraught with danger, since you don’t know what you’ll need until you start writing an app. That’s why it’s so important to let the bottom-up approach be guided by the needs of an actual application. It rarely goes well any other way. The problem isn’t starting top-down, but that people never do the bottom-up work that you uncover. They get around it in other ways, mostly by suffering. A lot of devs don’t even realize they’re suffering; they think it’s part of the work. Whereas if you pull apart the elements of your top-down program into their component parts, you’ll almost always end up with shorter programs that are more powerful. Sometimes exponentially so.