I agree that there's not much point in writing actual literal semantically correct code on a piece of paper, but I don't think that's at all the point of the ar

I agree that there's not much point in writing actual literal semantically correct code on a piece of paper, but I don't think that's at all the point of the article. The author talks about understanding the problem space, getting their ideas organized, and (if I may charitably interpret the article a bit) even go as far as scratching out some ideas of what the code might look like.