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That's true. But it (generally) doesn't let you discard your wrong ideas quickly, which is where the approach I was trying to describe gets most of its benefit. What you describe is much more akin to a waterfall model with a bunch of pseudocode and design up front but without an automated tool (the computer) actually able to run your program and tell you if it is going well.

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That depends on which wrong ideas you're thinking about.

Actually writing down pseudo-code is good at flushing out hidden assumptions, points of confusion, etc. I've found that tracing through pseudo-code can help identify bottlenecks and design flaws. And it is all much cheaper than a real program. So you get to discard a lot of wrong ideas quickly.

However coding up a test program and being able to run through cases quickly on a computer catches slightly different classes of mistakes. You might not catch a logic error in your code, but you are more likely to figure out how an external API works.

I think that both skills are valuable, and both let you discard wrong ideas quickly. They just catch different kinds of wrong ideas. :-)

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