Often, when I need to get familiar with a particularly tricky piece of code, I print it out and start annotating the printout, drawing arrows between dependent functions, visualizing data structures, algorithms and data flow, simplifying fragments in the margins, highlighting important stuff with different colors.
For fragments of code where search is not needed this is just such a superior experience. I dream of some day being able to do the same in a code editor with i.e. diagrams in comments or graphical annotations right there in the code.
The same applies to writing code. Being able to visualize hard-to-describe concepts on a piece of paper makes the overall algorithm as well as early design mistakes and edge cases much more obvious.
When I'm writing just text (todo lists, product ideas, whatever) and being able to easily edit, archive or search through the text a normal editor is a much better choice, but I'm not gonna ditch paper anytime soon.
For fragments of code where search is not needed this is just such a superior experience. I dream of some day being able to do the same in a code editor with i.e. diagrams in comments or graphical annotations right there in the code.
The same applies to writing code. Being able to visualize hard-to-describe concepts on a piece of paper makes the overall algorithm as well as early design mistakes and edge cases much more obvious.
When I'm writing just text (todo lists, product ideas, whatever) and being able to easily edit, archive or search through the text a normal editor is a much better choice, but I'm not gonna ditch paper anytime soon.