When I started at university, the professor who was going to teach us "Introduction to Programming" stated that people who had used flow charts in the past started with a disadvantage. During my entire CS masters, I never worked with flow charts.

I don't believe flow charts help you in creating structured programming. On the contrary, I believe they help you create spagetti programs. It's something from the fifties and sixties, when goto was a popular statement.

Flowcharts don't help you design a datastructure. Flowcharts don't help you with efficiency issues. Flowcharts don't help you in proving something to be correct. Flowcharts don't help to uncover design flaws. At best, flowcharts help you to determine the control flow of your program, but it doesn't help you to determine whether the flow is correct or not.

Design is good. Design doesn't necessary have to be done on paper. Just taking the time to think about the problem, and dividing it into subproblems is design too. Obviously, the more experience you have, the more you can avoid using paper to do design.

Most of the design I do on paper (or a whiteboard) consists of drawings. But not of the control flow - I never design control flow. With a good design, the control flow will be obvious anyway. But I do make drawings of datastructures, relations of pieces of data, or state diagrams. Different problems need different designs. Sometimes a datastructure is going to be the core of the program, and given a good datastructure, the algorithm is obvious (and then all you are left with is the implementation). But sometimes the datastructure isn't important or it's obvious, but the design needs a state diagram. Recently, I had to parse a logfile and extract quite some information. The datastructure wasn't too hard, a quadrupled nested hash/array, but because the logfile didn't have a consequent format and had entries missing, a state diagram was needed to make a good program.

Abigail

In reply to Re: Go with the flow? by Abigail-II
in thread Go with the flow? by void

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.