[chillee]

I'd say that in competitive programming, bottom-up is actually preferred.

Bottom up is faster, usually shorter to code, and allows certain kinds of optimizations you can't do with top down (sliding window, convex hull trick, etc).

Top down frees you from needing to think about order of computation, and also allows a different set of optimizations from bottom up (divide & conquer).

[alangpierce]

TBH it's been a while since I've done these contests seriously, but I remember the "order of computation" problem to be hard to think about for less trivial cases (like with a 3-dimensional table). But maybe I worried about it too much.

And just for fun, while we're listing these things:

Another advantage to bottom-up that I've seen is that sometimes top-down causes your recursion to get so deep that you run out of space in your call stack. Another advantage to top-down is that you're only filling in the subset of the table that's needed for the specific problem you're solving. Certainly someone with a lot of experience should be able to do both.

[chillee]

Some examples where order of computation isn't that trivial is when you're doing DP on trees or a DAG.

+1 to the "filling in a subset" part. Usually it's not too relevant because it's merely a constant factor change, but occasionally it'll be very important.