"Programming in the large" means designing a larger system as a composition of smaller parts, and "programming in the small" means creating those smaller parts by writing lines of code in a programming language.

By large programs we mean systems consisting of many small programs (modules), possibly written by different people. We need languages for programming-in-the-small, i.e. languages not unlike the common programming languages of today, for writing modules.

We argue that structuring a large collection of modules to form a "system" is an essentially dis- tinct and different intellectual activity from that of constructing the individual modules. That is, we distinguish programming-in-the-large from programming-in-the-small. Correspondingly, we be-

Programming in the Large vs. Programming in the Small • Large systems bring different challenges • What problems have you experienced? – Where/how do I extend the system? – What invariants hold of a large data structure? – What are a module’s clients/what does it use? – Tight coupling – Large interfaces Programming in the Large vs.

We distinguish the activity of writing large programs from that of writing small ones. By large programs we mean systems consisting of many small programs (modules), usually written by different people.

We distinguish the activity of writing large programs from that of writing small ones. By large programs we mean systems consisting of many small programs ("modules") written by different people, possibly in different languages. We need languages for programming-in-the-small, i.e. languages not un­

By large programs we mean systems consisting of many small programs (“modules”) written by different people, possibly in different languages. We need languages for programming-in-the-small, i.e. languages not unlike the common programming languages, for writing modules.

In software engineering, programming in the large and programming in the small describe two different approaches to writing software. The terms were coined by Frank DeRemer and Hans Kron in their 1975 paper "Programming-in-the large versus programming-in-the-small"

The design of the overall structure of a program is what I call "programming in the large." Programming in the small, which is sometimes called coding, would then refer to filling in the details of that design. The details are the explicit, step-by-step instructions for performing fairly small-scale tasks.