Here I was years ago wondering whether the Yourdon formalism or the Gane and Sarson formalism was better for doing your data flow analysis. It turns out doing

Here I was years ago wondering whether the Yourdon formalism or the Gane and Sarson formalism was better for doing your data flow analysis. It turns out doing dataflow analysis is just pretty much scorned by the programming community so it was moot. People just want to start coding and get that immediate dopamine hit of positive feedback. The answer to which formalism was better was "Agile" where you don't need to plan or even understand data flow (because it will emerge spontaneously); just write code between Ritalin hits. One result of this is that there are no good (free) tools out there to support either dataflow analysis formalism. I get blank looks for coworkers when I ask to see the dataflow analysis for their systems. Of course, I picked up the dataflow analysis thing working at a Waterloo startup as my first post-graduation job. The university I went to focused on data structures and algorithms (the how of software) rather than dataflow (the what of software). My first job taught me that data structures and algorithms are necessary but not sufficient.