Comment by antman
2 years ago
Interesting paper the one you shared and the justification paragraph on why pseudocode is more important than code in papers is surprising in a positive sense and appears apparent in retrospect. Quote:
"Source code vs pseudocode. Providing open source code is very useful, but not a proper substitute for formal algorithms. There is a massive difference between a (partial) Python dump and well-crafted pseudocode. A lot of abstraction and clean-up is necessary: remove boiler plate code, use mostly single-letter variable names, replace code by math expressions wherever possible, e.g. replace loops by sums, remove (some) optimizations, etc. A well-crafted pseudocode is often less than a page and still essentially complete, compared to often thousands of lines of real source code.'
The problem is that most pseudocode I see is not well crafted, and often seemingly no effort has gone into ensuring that it gives a complete or accurate picture.