When is it better to think without words?

I knew a really great programmer. He was also a classical pianist (and unrelatedly an astronomer). Well anyway he wrote large entire programs with mostly two character variable names. He usually conceives entire programs in his head and would write them out using whatever symbols were still available. Most of the time, I would see him sitting and swaying in his office chair and maybe touching fingertips while looking around at the ceiling or walls. His title back in the 80s before such things became memes was Chief Scientist. He also couldn't care less that another person at the company would write books and take credit for his creations. (Maybe he saw the marketing value in something he had no interest in doing.) Oh and the programming language used didn't have variable scoping--all global. It's kind of like Tesla designing an A/C motor in his minds eye and drawing it out only for purpose of communication.

I would say that this is the intuitive, naive way of starting coding if no one has taught you coding or you haven't had to care about maintainability or other people reading your code.

We could today give it to an AI and tell it to name the variables after manually renaming the input and output ones.