This is one of the most extraordinary things in Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (commonly abbreviated to PAIP on the Web) and it's a b

This is one of the most extraordinary things in Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (commonly abbreviated to PAIP on the Web) and it's a book full of extraordinary things. When he develops something, like his Othello-playing program in chapter 18 for instance, he starts off simple, develops as he goes along (with an eye for the overall design), makes mistakes and then fixes them - all the while telling you what he was thinking. I found it really encouraging. Here's this godlike coder who works at Google just doing incremental development until he has a really good finished product. At the end of it, you can't help thinking "but I could have done that!" In fact that was his overall purpose. In http://norvig.com/Lisp-retro.html http://norvig.com/Lisp-retro.html he says 'The main object of this book is to cause the reader to say to him or herself "I could have written that"' So yes, your option 3 is a great idea.