[nonrandomstring]

This is great stuff. It's how all code and data research should be presented, where the document is the program and you can reproduce it as easily as you can read it. After years of using Pure Data (a visual dataflow) whose unofficial motto was "The diagram is the program" I got this philosophy stuck deep in my brain. Today I use Org-Mode (In Emacs) for tangling (with something called Babel) that can run source code from many languages as part of an active document.

[michaelrpeskin]

I remember my first day of advanced computer graphics (25 years ago, so advanced then wasn’t advanced now) the whole class was shocked when the professor did his dramatic start of class saying “you should never document your code!”…dramatic pause…”you should code your document”.

I still think of that today when I’m writing complex algorithms. I write everything first in prose. Then translate that to a more list like structure. And then I fill in the code around that.

Works really well when I have to come back months later and figure out what I was thinking.

[syntaxfree]

What you describe sounds like top down development (“in the small”). When you try to use it for bottom-up reasoning, you get Jupyter notebooks.