> It's very important to work out assumptions and to be able to explore your models to find out where you've gone wrong. I agree and that's what I was getting

> It's very important to work out assumptions and to be able to explore your models to find out where you've gone wrong. I agree and that's what I was getting at. To me, it's 'programming' when create something that has to be consistent enough for us to be able to explore it with real data. Thought experiments are something we can easily get lost in. We can have interactive environments that we don't see as programming and they can be useful, but the discipline of being able to create those models and know that they are doing what we intend for the reasons we intend - that's programming, and people gain that discipline through environments that make them work for it to some degree.