[nv-vn]

I'm a big fan of literally sketching. One of my favorite things to do when approaching a hard programming problem is to enumerate a list of things I already know and then try to literally piece those together into an algorithm. I typically do this on paper, making diagrams of how things will fit together and examples.

But my "notation" here is always miles away from what code would look like, and I think "sketching" in pseudo-code or real code would fail to provide this same springboard. One of the biggest things with writing code is that data structures (especially in the form of objects) quickly lock you down to a certain design and it becomes progressively harder to think of the problem in any other way than your initial view of it. Plus, the hard parts typically require huge amounts of infrastructure to be in place before you can run them for the first time, which works much worse than an abstract brain model in my experience.

>It would be interesting if we had languages that would be great for prototyping but designed to be unusable in production.

The reality here is that people would find a way to make it usable in production and this vision of a good first draft would quickly fall apart :/