Member-only story
Pseu…Pseu…Pseudo(code) and Why You Should Use It.
When I first started learning to program I would sit down at my keyboard and start hammering away. No planning, no evaluation, just immediately start tackling the the project at hand. Pseudocode never even crossed my mind.
You may be asking, what is pseudocode? Pseudocode is a plain text representation of the code you are planning to write. You might write it in notepad, comments of your code, hardcopy, or with some specialized planning software of choice. How you write it doesn’t matter, just that you do.
Let’s pretend we have been tasked with writing the WashHair() function for a new Awesome Shower Program your company is creating. You could jump right into writing the code, or you could plot out what a shower would be like if you described it. A basic first pass pseudocode might look like the image on the side.
Now it would be perfectly OK to work from this pseudocode, but I like to take it one step further and not only describe the function in plain text but to map it out as well. Laying it into the actual layout of the function forces me to make a second pass and helps me catch any errors.
