> However this time I didn’t rush to implement, thanks mainly to the influence of Ed Ashcroft. In retrospect Ed’s first impulse when he had an idea was to document, not implement. We produced a series of widely read papers and soon had other researchers and brilliant students of our own working on it.

I'm not sure this actually applies to most people. The document vs implement struggle is something I see in modern software shops a lot. It certainly depends on the personality: some people just like thinking through everything and producing a coherent writeup before writing a single line of code, but for some writing code itself is an act that clarifies the still-murky concepts and helps to produce a good writeup.

But in the end, most people aren't producing novel enough technologies that the benefit of a complete writeup is there. You don't write something brilliant and have other researchers work on it; you merely write something for the benefit of a future colleague understand your code quickly. It's a very different class of software development.