Pseudocoding

Pseudocoding, you may be thinking what is exactly pseudocoding and is it even a word in the dictionary. Even as I type this, I get the red line under the word indicating that it may be an error in spelling and/or grammar. But it is not in the coding world. The process of pseudocoding is a very important one and hopefully by the time you are done reading this blog post, you might have a better understanding of what it exactly is.

First lets break up the word pseudocoding into two parts, pseudo and coding. The definition of pseudo as stated in the dictionary is “not actually but having the appearance of; pretended; false or spurious; sham” or “almost, approaching, or trying to be”. And coding is the process of creating instructions for computers using various programming languages. So what does that essentially mean when we put the two together? False coding process? Almost code? Yes and no.

In pseudocoding you aren’t really writing code, but rather writing or explaining in plain language (not programming language) the description and steps of how code would essentially work. What steps you would take to accomplish it, how would you go about accomplishing it, and why you would take that approach.

Still a little lost? No problem, you can basically think of pseudocoding as a process in which you can explain code in a way that a human can understand. You would do this so that anyone you are working with can comprehend your thought process that you go through even if they do not necessarily know the language in which you write said code.

For example, if you were to tell someone with no prior coding experience that you wanted to use a for loop or a built in programming method, 9 times out of 10 they would probably be super lost. In pseudocode, you explain what exactly those methods accomplish. “I want to invoke this for loop in order to iterate through each of the array’s elements, so that I can examine each element individually” or “I am going to use create this empty variable using an assignment operator, in order to hold elements for values that may have been duplicates.” Makes more sense when you say it that way right?

All in all, you want to accomplish pseudocoding, before you start actually writing any code. Through this process, you, as a human, can understand the inner workings of code that has yet to be written, and if you can understand the process in which it happens, then you can definitely translate so that the computer can understand it.