I like your analogy, perhaps because I was a musician at one time lol. I always used to analogy of cooking. You have ingredients, and you want to bake a cake.

I like your analogy, perhaps because I was a musician at one time lol. I always used to analogy of cooking. You have ingredients, and you want to bake a cake. Slapping all the ingredients in the bowl at once, won't make a cake. You need to know what to add, when to add, how much to add, how long to bake it, what temperature, and the order of it all. (good recipes are algorithms after all). Once the cake is made, do you have the tenacity to improve (troubleshoot) it? The cake is way too sweet!!! Can you figure out why? Was it too much sugar or too much icing? Was there sugar in the milk? Perhaps caramel would be better than sugar, etc.. It takes a certain style of of thinking. One that requires, like you said, knowledge of the "state" of things, but also it requires accounting for many possible outcomes of said states e.g. input sanitization and/or input validation. It's not a forest vs. the trees style of thinking, but the forest AND the trees. The deeper you go, the larger and denser the forest becomes.