[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.