[linguae]

When I took an introductory programming class at Sacramento City College in fall 2004 during my senior year of high school, we spent the first half of the semester designing our programs using flowcharts and pseudocode. We were encouraged to check the logic of our flowcharts and pseudocode. In the second half of the semester, we implemented those programs in C++.

I haven’t seen this pedagogical practice in any other introductory course I’ve seen since. I believe it’s a holdover from the early days of computing, when programmers didn’t have access to personal computers or even interactive computing, which meant that programmers needed to spend more up-front time on design. Think of the punchcard era, for example.

I teach introductory programming in C++ at Ohlone College in Fremont, and I have my students write C++ on Day 1, starting with “Hello World” and going from there without flowcharts.

[dataflow]

I think it's for all intents and purposes impossible to program like this in this century. Like imagine just writing x + y in C++. Are you seriously going to enumerate every declaration of operator+ in the translation unit in your head to see if it's eligible (don't forget ADL)? And then every single possible implicit conversion or promotion that could make other ones eligible? And then go through all the overload resolution rules that practically no humans have memorized (with any template instantiations that may come into play) to figure out if the declaration you wanted is actually the best match? That's before you even look at its definition...