Working link for: Wirth, N. (1971). Program development by stepwise refinement - <a href="https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Articles/StepwiseRefinement.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Articles/StepwiseRefi...</a>
Computer Science is notorious for ignoring history. Back in the 80s I would go down to the library and read the literature. When I ran across something exciting I'd go back to my office and use it for some problem I was working on.<p>My colleagues were always astonished at my "brilliance". It didn't matter that I referenced the paper in the code and even brandished the hardcopy (thats what we had in those days) -- it was inconceivable that I might have found something in the literature and made more sense that they were working with a "genius".<p>When I moved into Pharma 20 years later it was the opposite: we would find interesting and relevant results in papers more than 20 years old.