Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flow Charts

neil.fraser.name

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 31 posts

Re: Flow Charts

#21

Post by bdunbar »

sek wrote: post #11
danso wrote: post #9

Amusing that this takes place in Saigon. My mom is from there and her knowledge of COBOL is why she still has a programming job today

You are the first adult guy I heard of who has a mother who is a programmer. Just realized that. I can't talk with my parents about my daily work, having a mom like that must be awesome.

Interesting.

My father started working in data processing in 1965, two years before I was born.

When I lateral moved to 'IT' in 1990 we finally were able to talk about 'work'. Since we didn't do 'feelings' this was a major step forward for us.

Re: Flow Charts

#22

Post by FigBug »

sek wrote: post #11
danso wrote: post #9

Amusing that this takes place in Saigon. My mom is from there and her knowledge of COBOL is why she still has a programming job today

You are the first adult guy I heard of who has a mother who is a programmer. Just realized that. I can't talk with my parents about my daily work, having a mom like that must be awesome.

My aunt was a programmer. She gave me my first computer (TRS-80) and taught me to program in the 80s. By the time I got my degree and started working as a programmer she had retired to northern BC and was no longer into technology. I owe my career to her.

Re: Flow Charts

#24

Post by ndefinite »

"But what will most certainly be forgotten is there was a generation of students in the 1980s and 1990s who were encouraged to use flow charts, long after the reason for using them had disappeared."

I don't know if I entirely agree with his conclusion. The smartest people I know code with a pen and paper. When they're on the bus or subway. When relaxing, or thinking carefully while away from a computer.

Those who program in the shower and then write it down after before they forget. Analogue programming tools (pan/paper) are great tools.

I thought the article was going to end with him pointing out that he found a great practice that we can all benefit from now. Planning code ahead of time is still better than typing away, we're just not forced to do it anymore.

Re: Flow Charts

#25

Post by gruseom »

Those are great pictures, but the claim that drawing flow charts saved time in the punch card era doesn't make sense to me. My bet is that, then as now, good programmers soon discovered that they were a waste, favored only by textbook writers and managers. They are a non-programmer's idea of what a program ought to look like. There have always been far more powerful tools to work with in the absence of a keyboard, like pencil and paper—not to mention just plain thinking.

There are many programmers around who worked with punch cards. I have often heard them emphasize how important it was to get your program right the first time, because compile time was so lengthy and scarce. But I've never heard one say "that's why it was important to draw a flow chart first". If they had, I'd remember; it would have been such a surprise!

Some HNers must have been programming in those days. I'd like to hear from them about this.

Re: Flow Charts

#26

Post by Leszek »

sek wrote: post #11
danso wrote: post #9

Amusing that this takes place in Saigon. My mom is from there and her knowledge of COBOL is why she still has a programming job today

You are the first adult guy I heard of who has a mother who is a programmer. Just realized that. I can't talk with my parents about my daily work, having a mom like that must be awesome.

I'm an adult -- well, close enough, 25 -- and my mother is a programmer (mostly C#).

Re: Flow Charts

#27

Post by opminion »

onemorepassword wrote: post #17

Funny, the more my job involves explaining to developers what is needed rather than coding it myself, the more I tend to fall back on flowcharts and diagrams to describe the higher level business processes. I'm all in favor of agile direct communication with the client, but one decent flowchart can save spending hours in meetings trying to get everyone to understand what the problem is we need to solve. Although no l…

The main problem with flowcharts for programming is that flowcharts are procedural, whereas much of what we do in programming is declarative: the flowchart describes more how to do something than what has to be done (at some level).

Of course, this depends on at which level the flowchart is drawn.

Re: Flow Charts

#28

Post by rodw »

dkersten wrote: post #19
rodw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Lisp, COBOL, Fortran and Algol were all invented more then 50 years ago (incidently, 3 of the 4 are still moderately common). A programmer working in the 1970s or 1980s could easily have a child 20 to 30 years old now. I can't readily find the BLS Handbook of labor Statistics from the period online, but there must have been quite a few of them/us by the mid-1980s.

incidently, 3 of the 4 are still moderately common I assume you're talking about Algol as the one not in moderately common . But the lisps, cobol and fortran in use today generally isn't the same as 50 years ago (maaaybe legacy cobol/fortran stuff is?) - especially the lisps used today (mostly common lisp, scheme and new lisps like clojure) are very different from what they were 50 years ago to the degree that they a…

"I don’t know what language engineers will use in the future, but I know they’ll call it Fortran."

(A famous quote, but a quick Google doesn't yield a definitive attribution for it.)

Yes, Algol was what I meant as the odd one out. Your point is well taken, although I think this implies more that Algol is among the living than that modern Lisp/COBOL/Fortran are completely divorced from their first-generation ancestry. (To be clear, I read your comment as agreeing with me here, I'm just highlighting the distinction.)

Re: Flow Charts

#29

Post by dkersten »

rodw wrote: post #28
dkersten wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

incidently, 3 of the 4 are still moderately common I assume you're talking about Algol as the one not in moderately common . But the lisps, cobol and fortran in use today generally isn't the same as 50 years ago (maaaybe legacy cobol/fortran stuff is?) - especially the lisps used today (mostly common lisp, scheme and new lisps like clojure) are very different from what they were 50 years ago to the degree that they a…

"I don’t know what language engineers will use in the future, but I know they’ll call it Fortran." (A famous quote, but a quick Google doesn't yield a definitive attribution for it.) Yes, Algol was what I meant as the odd one out. Your point is well taken, although I think this implies more that Algol is among the living than that modern Lisp/COBOL/Fortran are completely divorced from their first-generation ancestry.…

Yes, I wasn't really disagreeing, but it irks me a bit how a lot of people talk about languages (usually Lisp) as if it were the exact same language that was created 60 years ago that's in use today despite that they have evolved significantly over time and yet the Algol-derived languages are treated completely independently as entirely new entities altogether. Someone mentioned this on HN a day or two ago too.

It would be wrong to say that Lisp/COBOL/Fortran are divorced from their first-generation ancestry. I think a lot of people talk about Lisp as if its still the same language because on the surface it looks like that way: the syntax is mostly still intact and the core values (conses, lists, homoiconicity, macros) are all still these, yet Scheme is still a different beast from Common Lisp, Clojure, Emacs Lisp and what Zeta Lisp was. Algol-derived languages, since they have much more complex syntax than s-expressions, have much more varied syntax and therefore look like very different languages, though they still have a lot of semantics in common with algol.

So I think what I'm saying is (at Least for Lisp and Algol - I don't know enough about COBOL and Fortran to know how different they now are from 50 years ago) in neither of these cases are the languages in use today the same languages that were in use 50 years ago, but that both families of languages have descendants in common use today which can be clearly traced to their first-generation ancestry.

Re: Flow Charts

#30

Post by raintrees »

I still have my flowchart stencils and a couple of pads of gridded report and display paper from my COBOL classes... I need to clean my office.
Post reply on HN