This was one of the reason, I started looking at APL, to be able to write code better on paper.

And a reason why I like applicative programming in haskell with all of its squiggly <$> and <*>.

Another interesting idea might be to look at TLA+, because it reminds me of the way I used to scribble out basic ideas for physics simulations, i.e distance with accelerating velocity:

s' = s + v /\ v' = v + dv