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Free (as in beer) Windows Flowcharting?
bhtooefr asks: "I need a flowcharting program for use in one of my programming classes at Central Ohio Technical College, and I can't afford to spend much money. The instructor recommended that I use Microsoft Visio, but it's way past my budget (and I can't obtain it for free). I've tried a free trial app (SmartDraw), but I didn't like the UI at all. Kivio won't do the job, because the free version is only for KDE, and Kivio MP isn't free. However, if there's a Kivio port to Windows that is free, I'd be rather interested. Any ideas here?"
Of course this could be for historical purposes, but is that still done in schools? Some bad habits die hard, I guess, but I thought that flowcharting was dropped when Dijkstra declared "goto" harmful. Flowcharting has given way to pseudocode and for some UML (not that it shouldn't go the way of flowcharting, but every tool has its purpose). It's a very dangerous way of looking at coding, as it discourages abstraction, assumes a global data space (when scoping is essential to modern programming), and allows for arbitrary jumps from point to point (i.e. goto). Of course this could be all part of the lesson, but in case it isn't, I just want this student to know that there is so much more to visual software design. Of course, UML is popular these days, and for user interaction, there's the Visual Interaction Vocabulary by Jesse James Garrett. There are lessons to be learned from Flowcharting, but mostly about what to avoid.
I can't believe people don't know about this program. It's great for all kinds of diagrams. I mostly use it for UML diagrams and E/R database diagrams. Being a programmer, that's the type of stuff I do.
Get it here: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/
It works with windows or linux, you just needs the gtk. And if you use gaim for windows, then you've already got it.
http://gaim.sf.net IYDAK
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