alt Hacker Newsif you write your program first with pencil and paper u'll be amazed at what you can do yourself.
most people open an ide and start coding, or write some basic diagrams to get an overview/mental model. Back in the day any bitnlarge program would take hours to compile so really u did not want to have any bug or typo just to sit for hours until a compile error or logic mistake. Take it even further back to days before C and that is even more needed.
a lot of high level modern languages seem to alleviate that need, likely so that enterprise software can be written a bit faster because the features need to arrive faster.
still in more modern languages i'd recommend starting with pencil and paper, write most of it if not the whole thing out. u'll find much nicer patterns and will save yourself a bunch of refactoring. even for small programs.
When I was at school, I used to program on paper like this (due to not having a computer during class). It was accidentally a great exercise, that I think everyone should try. Because of it, I find myself writing mostly bug-free code on my first try these days (my bugs tend to happen on interactions between parts of a system I designed separately).