Bullshit.
I never see anyone learning to program using pseudocode (which isn't runnable to get feedback).
If they used pseudocode, were they just run the program in their heads?
I never see anyone learning to program using pseudocode (which isn't runnable to get feedback).
If they used pseudocode, were they just run the program in their heads?
In Software Tools Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger describe a pseudo-language called RATFOR (Rational Fortran), and then throughout the book implement RATFOR in itself.
Getting feedback while learning to program has a lot of value, but so does learning to think through code in your head. People old enough to remember when you had to wait a day to run your program and get results back (very slow turnaround) know the value of that skill, we used to call it "desk checking" -- reading through your code and running it in your head and on paper.
But to unable to run actual code at all? Come on. Who learns programming that way?
Edsger Dijkstra was a proponent of that approach i.e. develop program and proof by hand in a language for which there is no compiler/interpreter.
I wrote about it here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47985605
This is itself a skill people need to learn, that I'm not sure is possible with pseudocode and no prior experience. Too easy to gloss over details without actually running it to learn where your blind spots are.
I did this workshop a decade or so ago where I learned my co-workers don't do this, and never did learn how they understand code otherwise. One of them mentioned he didn't even realize this was a thing.
This particular statement interested me.
In code review, I always am a stickler that "if I need to run the code in my head to prove something about it for me, I want to see that in a unit test - I shouldn't have questions about the code that aren't already answered by the tests"
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.