From p63 of the Design Pattern Slide by Peter Norvig.

It sounds like a very good advise.

Design Strategy: English Translation

-  To insure that your program says what you mean:

(1) Start with English description

(2) Write code from description

(3) Translate code back to English; compare to (1)

Example: (1), (2) from a Lisp textbook (1) “Given a list of monsters, determine the number that are swarms.”

(2) See next slide

(3) “Given a list of monsters, produce a 1 for a monster whose type is swarm, and a 0 for others. Then add up the numbers.”