This approach is known as 'Top Down'[1] and was VERY popular in the early days of system and program design. When I started my career I encountered a beardy-sa

This approach is known as 'Top Down'[1] and was VERY popular in the early days of system and program design. When I started my career I encountered a beardy-sandal-wearing systems programmer[2] , who 100% believed that there should be more comments than code in a program. His approach was to use the comments to write out long-form exactly what the program would do. He would write the whole solution as 1000's of comment lines, from start to finish in one big comment block. Once he'd done that, he'd then start again at the top, and split the comments at a natural point and insert real code to reflect the 100 or so comments above it. At the time, I thought it was a crazy way to do it, and even now I wouldn't do it. But it had it's upsides. His code was really easy for others to maintain, and it was also fundamentally self documenting. --- [1] http://dept-info.labri.fr/~strandh/Teaching/MTP/Common/Strandh-Tutorial/top-down-programming.html http://dept-info.labri.fr/~strandh/Teaching/MTP/Common/Stran... [2] Ironically, my beard is now WAY longer than his ever was.