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I agree with you; it is hand-wavey and strays into "spherical cows in a vacuum" territory. Practical for discussions, not so great for implementations, where details matter greatly. I would presume the original diagram was meant to align on the specifics; the revised version from the author leaves much to interpretation.

> I expect it is also easier to verify the correctness of and find bugs in my diagram if someone were to want to.

This will vary on the language in which it is implemented, right?

>Removing nodes by adding a concept of implicit branches via "unless" clauses within a node doesn't necessarily make the system any easier to understand at a glance.

It kind of does though, because it's easier to understand what the system does in general without necessarily wanting/needing all the lower level detail.

That's also one of the reasons we use functions, instead of unrolling everything into a big ball of code, no?

That’s not reducing complexity at all though, just hiding it…

Which is fine for someone working a job that doesn’t need to understand all the stuff behind the curtain, but not fine for anyone who actually wants to understand the overall system.

>That’s not reducing complexity at all though, just hiding it…

It's a representation. The actual thing will still have the whole complexity.

What is reduced is how much complexity we take in when looking at what the thing does. When someone wants to get an idea of what the thing does, as opposed to getting into the minutiae of every subcase, such a high level view is a better fit.

Regardless, it's not suitable for those who do need to grasp the entirety...

Above some point they can just check the code.

People looking at flowcharts usually don't need the entirety. Especially as the flowchart could even be out of date, or miss some of the code-level subleties.

Why would those seeking to grasp the entirety use a less efficient and more cumbersome method, than just looking at the full flowchart in the first place? (assuming it exists)

And I don’t see why it matters if it’s only a handful of people, information products can still be created for their needs, if so decided.

Because the code is the entirety of the process. Any graph can be wrong, but the code cannot, because it is the implementation. The purpose of a graph is to allow the visualization of the process in an understandable manner. If it doesn't abstract away much from the code, you might as well look at the code directly

No?

Code is not always the same as the process or what the machine actually does... There are hundreds of posible factors from bitflips to a cable getting loose in a socket that could change either.

e.g. There clearly can be a computer configured with enough memory and dense enough memory that at least one bitflip is practically guaranteed in a certain unit time, so the actual process has to include that.

So the code is an abstraction just like the flowchart.

You have processes more formal and thorough than their code implementation? Really?

At the end of the day, is it the cover-every-possible-bitflip-and-gamma-ray-bursts process that produces results out of thin air, or is it the machine running the code?

I don't believe this is arguing in good faith.

I never said I had such processes?

You seem to be making a logical fallacy to impute that it somehow must exist.

e.g. “ The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Also why would any other reader, including me, care about beliefs about certain words more than the actual words?

>Code is not always the same as the process or what the machine actually does...

You started with why aren't they "just looking at the full flowchart [to understand the entirety]".

And the parent wrote that because the flowchart is not the entirety, the code is.

Do you think this retort you make above is refuting the parent's point? If anything, it expands it, going further against your original point: that's why they're not just looking at the full flowchart.

And, yes, "code is an abstraction, just like the flowchart", but code is the abstraction the programmer controls and tries to summarize and understand. The flowchart is a higher level abstraction of an abstraction.

Are you confused about the meaning of understanding vs a literal equivalence?

e.g. “ Because the code is the entirety of the process” is clearly false regardless of which way you look at it.

But ‘the code is the combined understanding of the entirety of the process’ may or may not be true depending on many many factors.

‘Understanding X’ clearly does not mean, or even imply, that it literally is this or that…

>Are you confused about the meaning of understanding vs a literal equivalence?

No, but you seem to be about any context not spelled out completely and pedantically.

>e.g. “ Because the code is the entirety of the process” is clearly false regardless of which way you look at it.

A coder works on code (literally editing lines of code, which is what they deliver), and is called to create, understand, and debug code.

Else, sure, code also runs on some server, by some organization, that had meetings to decide the requirements, and there are also end users, and the whole thing runs in some planet, inside a universe, or perhaps a multi-verse, so the code its not the entirety of the process /s

> Removing nodes by adding a concept of implicit branches via "unless" clauses within a node doesn't necessarily make the system any easier to understand at a glance.

The original diagram does this too - it has an "A && B" node.

I think it's ok to combine simple booleans into one box for the same reason we do that in code.

You generally write `if a and b { foo }` not `if a { if b { foo } }`.

From my perspective simple boolean means a single known value stored in one variable. I suspect the underlying code performs a number of calculations for each one of the flow chart "booleans". Of course, maybe that points to a design flaw and there should be a single policy instance that aggregates all of the variables into one place.