I don't think that's the issue here. It's the verboseness of code/pseudocode which this solves. The understandingness of code was not raised as a problem.

This notation is not to say that ideas can be expressed better on paper with this notation, but rather that, in situations where you must use pencil (such as whiteboarding), code is overly verbose and this notation is less so.

Then again, I do see some benefits of writing this on paper over writing code on a keyboard, like the flexibility of being able to write wherever you want, and write notes or pictures in the margins. But these are minor.

Also I may have misunderstood your comment.

Edit: actually, upon rereading: I guess you were referring to this line in the opening paragraph

>But our programming languages are very poorly suited for handwriting: they waste the spatial arrangement, ideographic symbols, text size variation, and long lines (e.g. horizontal and vertical rules, boxes, and arrows) that we can easily draw by hand, instead using textual identifiers and nested grammatical structure that can easily be rendered in ASCII (and, in the case of older languages like FORTRAN and COBOL, EBCDIC and FIELDATA too.)

which is an interesting thing to think about. So I guess your criticism of modern computers for representing ideas is valid. But I suppose the advantage of the more restricted inputs of a computer (keyboard into a 1d string of ascii text) is the structure that it inherently has, that paper and pencil does not. So there are tradeoffs.

One use is working out ideas when you're not sitting at a desk. You can easily carry around a small notebook which is much more usable than a phone for this. (If you have a favorite on-phone programming environment that's better, I'd like to hear of it.)