[ddaud]

This is exactly my thought. Be it pen and paper or digital, writing out what your software needs to do and how it will do it saves an immense amount of time debugging or throwing things at the wall. I’m shocked at some of the responses here; there is a qualitative difference in the development experience when you spend the time designing (I also frequently do this by hand, but it doesn’t have to be) before implementing anything vs. opening an IDE and hammering something out.

I’d go further to say that software development isn’t about writing code, it’s about designing and understanding programs. Code is an implementation detail, the understanding is what is crucial.