Comment by ndriscoll

Design reviews don't mean you don't write code first. We have a change that we're about to put through security review right now to special case TLS handling when talking to some older clients, but before we put a proposal forward, I validated that the core idea will actually work and that we can heavily restrict the scope of what the change applies to by writing the code and tests to do it. Meetings and asking multiple people to read through and provide feedback on documents very quickly racks up hours. Best to spend an hour or two first validating that what you're proposing isn't nonsense. This lets us be very specific about what the problem is, what the proposed solution is, and what the risks are.

With data classification, you're going to need to think through what data you are using and what you want to do with it. i.e. write a program.

I didn't claim class structure or indentation matters. I'm saying that assuming you are discussing some sort of algorithm or functionality, a formal language is a perfectly fine thing to use for thinking about the problem and writing down your ideas. Writing "what it actually does and how it does it" is just programming. If you write your ideas in a language like Scala, they can easily be more concise (so easier to review) than they would be in English, and you get a compiler helping you think through things.