The point is, he was able to write down quickly his ideas in C (any other real or pseudolanguage would do), while he would not be able to do it if he had to look up the details of each and every instruction while he tries to put down his ideas. <p>

That's not too bad of an approach when writing any program: Write the comments first, and document what the code should do. Then write the actual code. Since you don't have to think about what the code should do, you also have more brain-cycles to spend on the details of the language.