[tangled]

This is approach is great for greenfield development, but when it comes to software maintenance I find myself having to think in terms of the target language so that I can formulate the right long-term solution for the codebase in question.

[dkarapetyan]

Yes, this is true. For maintenance projects I've noticed that before I can sketch things out I have to translate the existing codebase into the proper abstract domain but in my experience this is just an extra step and does not negate the general approach of thinking in a domain that is completely free of programming language related issues.