[sdenton4]

Yeah, you should always, always code what you're thinking about, IMHO. I once turned in a take home differential geometry final in the form of an ipython notebook because I found computing curvature coefficients so tedious. Debugging the thing to pass all my unit tests (not to mention solving the test question) probably have me the best understanding of anyone in the class.

[vidarh]

I had a similar experience - I learned symbolic differentiation largely because I happened to pick up a book on Prolog about the time we started covering it at school, and the book gave symbolic differentiation as an example. Not having a Prolog interpreter, I rewrote the thing in Pascal, and then wrote an expression parser for it. Debugging my Pascal translation really hammered home the rules for me at the time (and subsequently writing an expression parser for it was what got me interested in compilers).