[kaseyb002]

There is an interesting parallel here between bottom-up programming and the common law system. Common-law courts don't create law in advance; they wait for conflicts to arise.

After enough similar conflicts arise and cases have been decided, an abstract "law" organically emerges that is used to decide future similar conflicts.

[mbrock]

It's also kind of just like concept formation and theory building in science.

In algebraically or mathematically oriented communities like much of the Haskell world, you see a similar kind of "bottom-up programming" but with an added focus on compositional structures with laws for reasoning.

When a Haskell module really comes together beautifully, it's because you've managed to extract useful standalone concepts that combine in an algebraic way, with binary operators, associativity, and so on.

Eric Evans in Domain-Driven Design, usually considered a book about object orientation, also comes to a conclusion that if most of a program's logic can be expressed in pure functions and closed operations on value objects, then you can attain a "supple design."

I suppose the Lisp community has concepts like "value abstractions and syntactic abstractions" or something like that, one of them being related to well-suited data types, and the other being related to macros.

Incidentally, I've recently come to realize that Agda, the dependently-typed Haskell-style language, comes very close to being Lisp-like in its support for syntactic abstractions: you can go a long way with just custom mixfix operators (e.g., defining if_then_else_)... and then there's also a sophisticated macro system, using an AST data type and a "typechecker monad."

It's a lot of fun!