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When I was in school in the mid-80's flowcharts were already a bit outdated, and I've never seen them since in my 40 years of programming. The problem with flo
by Dutchie987 3y ago
When I was in school in the mid-80's flowcharts were already a bit outdated, and I've never seen them since in my 40 years of programming.
The problem with flowcharts is that a real program has so many conditional paths you can't possibly fit it on paper. One solution is to have a very high level flowchart and have separate flowcharts to "zoom in" on parts. I doubt (and the industry seems to think so too) that flowcharts help in any way in modern programming.
- nivertech 3y agoI have a programming for kids book from mid or late 80s. It teaches two languages (one Logo-like, and another Python-like), and the author wrote that they don't use flowcharts because they resemeble GoTo operators (i.e. arrows are implemented as either conditional or unconditional jumps). To replace the need in visuals they used BNF-style syntax diagrams when teaching the programming languages syntax. Given said that do use flowcharts drawn using PlantUML sometimes. Usually when reverse engineering undocumented codebase, or when trying to explain something to my colleagues. Flowcharts are only good for very simple control flows / behaviors, there are lots of other types of diagrams or visualization methods depending on the usecase.