Hands-On Software Engineering with Python

Development paradigms

Programming, when it first appeared, was often limited by hardware capabilities and the higher-level languages that were available at the time for simple procedural code. A program, in that paradigm, was a sequence of steps, executed from beginning to end. Some languages supported subroutines and perhaps even simple function-definition capabilities, and there were ways to, for example, loop through sections of the code so that a program could continue execution until some termination condition was reached, but it was, by and large, a collection of very brute-force, start-to-finish processes.

As the capabilities of the underlying hardware improved over time, more sophisticated capabilities started to become more readily ...