My problem with Computer Science pseudo code

I remembered opening books of Computer Science to learn algorithm when I began. And my first reaction was: it seems unnecessarily complicated like maths, but I must be an idiot since I learnt physics.

So 15 years later I reopened Introduction To Algorithms By Thomas H Cormen, Charles E Leiserson, Ronald L Rivest, Clifford Stein. And I decided to see if my experience in coding would help me appreciate this book for all the knowledge it could bring me.

So I decided to take a look at the simple heap structure and algorithms:

Let's look at the pseudo code (see here for the whole chapter):

When I see this pseudo code, and think of actual production code, I am dazzled:

• it has meaningless variable;
• API and variable names (like the global heap_size) are quite hard to grok; 
• I wonder if recursion is really important knowing it is hard to read, debug, and may reach a recursion limit;
• I have a hard time understanding how it works. 

So  I thought, maybe I am just an idiot and I tried to see if I could do a better job at writing pseudo code which would help understand. (I used python as a pseudo code checker)

Here is my heapify function (the whole code is here  https://gist.github.com/3927135 if you want to check the correctness):

def heapify(_array,index=1, heap_size=SENTINEL):
    """bubbles down until it is correctly located.
    heap_size can be used internally for optimization purpose"""
    if heap_size == SENTINEL:
        heap_size= len(_array)
    a_child_is_bigger= True
    while a_child_is_bigger:
        largest= index
        left_pos, right_pos = left_offset(index), right_offset(index)

        #check left
        if left_pos < heap_size and _array[left_pos] > _array[index]:
            largest= left_pos

        #check right
        if right_pos < heap_size and _array[right_pos]>_array[largest]:
            largest= right_pos

        if largest == index:
            # we are finally the king of the hill, end of story
            a_child_is_bigger= False
        else:
            #swap with child // bubble down
            _array[index], _array[largest] = _array[largest], _array[index]
            index= largest

And by coding it revealed what I feared the most: CS and computer developers don't live in the same world: the way a code is written matters.

1. getting read of the asymmetric test line 5 greatly improves the understanding of the logic;
2. by using full name for tests conditions you really help people (you included) understanding thus maintaining your code;
3. recursion comes in the way of understanding straightforward code; 
4. one letter variable names are really unhelpful variable names;
5. their code typography is even worse than mine.

I have made python code to check the whole logic: writing a tinge more readable code does not seems to prevent it from working (I may have a problem on the boundary because this hidden heap_size variable is a pain to understand).

By the way if you want really efficient heap structure in python please use : http://docs.python.org/library/heapq.html because it is just plain better, superbly documented, tested and the source code is quite nice too.

Now, I am plain lost: when I check CS papers because I want to solve a problem I often stumble on unreadable pseudo code and verbiage. Understanding the API, the variable name ... takes an awful lot of time. When I write in python I have the feeling that it is a Pseudo Code Translator, so if we assume my implementation is close visually and logically from pseudo code, does it costs that much to improve pseudo code readability?

If I can do it knowing that I am one of the most stupid developer among the one I know, why or how can't they do the same. Pseudo code is for sharing knowledge, do we really need to waste time de-ciphering these pseudo codes to be a real or better developer?

When you see equivalent code in industry grade application, you normally hate that. It is plain bad practices. Isn't computer sciences supposed to teach elite grade developers?

And when I see such code, I sometime wonder if the guy understood what he wrote.

Meaningful variables names, test conditions, readability is what matters, because code is meant to be improved and fixed.

With all these questions in my head I came to a conclusion: I don't take for profound what I think is uselessly obscure, so my opinion of CS papers and academics has dramatically dropped.


EDIT: now, I see that bulbbling down and bubbling up can be extracted from the logic, and I guess it can be used to make a heap usable for min/max efficient inserting/extraction.