-=> Quoting Chris Gunn to Bill White <=-
 CG> Flow charting is also very important.  If you can't organize and
 CG> diagram chunks of a program on paper, you are going to have problems
 CG> trying to organize the source code.  Those nice little plastic
 CG> templates with diamonds and squares should be one of the first tools
 CG> purchased towards a programming career. 
I never found them to be of much use, and I eventually discarded the
topic even when I was teaching this stuff. For all but the most trivial
program they're more trouble than they're worth IMO. What I do end up
with after finishing a large project is dozens of scraps of coffee-
stained paper with all sorts of drawings, doodles, and scritches, that
somehow contributed to the final product, but which taken at face
value don't look like much of anything. If I can't figure out the steps
of a process in my head (and keep them there!) I'll write something
resembling pseudocode with lines and arrows to help indicate what's
happening. That's the closest I get to flow charts. Interestingly, just
as I was wrapping up my teaching career, the province's Ministry of
Education also de-emphasized flow-charting in the Computer Science
curriculum. Too often, I saw flow-charting used by the teacher as busy-
work when there wasn't one computer for every student, i.e. "You can't
enter any program code into the computer until I have seen and approved
your flow-chart." Great way to turn kids on to programming!
--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.20
---------------