[okmjuhb]

I always do my first draft of any nontrivial large system by writing the code out longhand, after having heard it recommended by multiple people I respect. My perception is that the resulting code is cleaner and better documented, and that my error rate has dropped to almost 0.

Writing your code this way encourages a "write as you would speak" tone in the resulting code, better decomposition, and better documentation. It also means that each line gets reviewed from a fresh start at least twice before making it to the computer.

The biggest problem comes when you're working with a large API you don't know well; you're frequently forced to experiment with it in a manner that this sort of batching doesn't really handle well.