The pseudocode and block diagram as professional programming

[mfleming]

(10-04-2018 02:19 AM)cruff Wrote:  I never understood why someone would bother writing non-executable pseudocode instead of directly in the language of your choice, unless it was meant for books.

This is the age-old debate between the "Just do it!" programming crowd (exemplified by the t-shirt cat | cc - ; a.out ) and the design before you build crowd. An interesting approach to the latter is Test Driven Development in a Jupyter notebook environment. I'm just now dipping my toes in this approach and find it to be a very satisfying example of interactive Literate Programming. TDD forces you to think of the API before coding, and the notebook documents the code results. Before long you find yourself focused as much on capturing the development thought process in prose as in code. Bonus: months later you don't have to figure out what the heck you wrote

Try it sometime!
~Mark