Good ways to overcomplicate your code and slow down development

[Dan Shafer]

While I don't always follow this procedure (partcularly on small, one-off
problems), when I'm doing original coding, I frequently write the program in
pseudo-code comments and then go back and write uncommented lines of actual
executable code between the comments.

Perhaps because I'm primarily a writer/user-of-words, I find this approach
to design particularly useful. With a fair degree of frequency, I find that
simply uncommenting a line or two of pseudo-code produces executable
Transcript code. Then I can think for a brief moment at least that
Transcript is self-documenting. It isn't, of course, but the illusion is
pleasant.

Dan