Data Definitions, Not Flowcharts

Computer programs are best understood in terms of the data they consume, process and produce. Flowcharts are useful for visualizing control flow, but not for understanding complexity.

One of the most famous quotes of Frederick Brooks is:

Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious.

-- The Mythical Man-Month, 1975

This quote is my constant reminder that computer programs are best understood in terms of the data they consume, process and produce. The information that a flowchart provides is not only too abstract, but also vague and underspecified even as a conceptual model.

Defining what a computer program is deserves its own blog post, but my point here is that it is NOT primarily about the procedures and control flows, but rather the data structures and their relationships.

I keep emphasizing that data definitions are not only important for the implementation of a program, but also for its design and documentation. It is the only connection to the phase of problem analysis: The more precisely the data is defined during analysis, the more precise the implementation will be.

Although I enjoy doodling diagrams, I never bring them to the fight. Instead, I sit down and write down the data types and their relationships in a programming language.

One benefit of using high-level, strongly typed functional programming languages is that functions and effects can be expressed in terms of type definitions: Function signatures and effect constraints are type definitions, and so on. You can even use defunctionalization to express functions as data definitions, which is a common technique in functional programming.

In Haskell, I usually create a module named Algebra and tinker with the definitions there. I still like to refer to my prototype as an algebra, a habit from when I was studying algebraic data types and free monads. How it is implemented (interpreted) is not important at this point.

What is wrong with flowcharts? Nothing, but they are not the right tool for analyzing and designing a program. They are useful for visualizing the control flow of a program, but not for understanding its complexity. When it comes to communicating the high-level view of a program or a system to a complete non-technical audience, I still use flowcharts.

Lastly, I have been thinking about how arrows can be used to describe a high-level view of a program. Inspired by category theory, they offer a way to represent computation (that is, that transforms input of type A into output of type B), abstracting away internal implementation details while still focusing on inputs and outputs.

This focus on data transformations is why I am exploring arrows as a design tool -- they force you to think in terms of data type transformations rather than procedural steps.