Ha! I had to read that in the 8th grade. At first it was very confusing, because I thought I for some reason got a book in French. But then I just skipped to the part where it started in Russian. Later, after a discussion in class, I got a vague idea that that part was some sort of a description of a ball and some high-society stuff... it wasn't at all useful for any further work we had to do on the book, so, I don't actually know what that part was about. All further reading and discussion focused on countess Olga and her thinking about the war (which the teacher claimed was the reflection of Tolstoy's own views).

But, more to the point of literal programming: it's not the only tool that wants programmers to write some sort of a plan or a sketch of the code before writing code. A much more popular technique is TDD, which, again, wants programmers to write something informally first, and then formalize it later in code. And, as with literal programming, my experience was that it's not helpful to the point of being a distraction.

There's a good reason to think that some sort of a sketch or a blueprint might be useful for the future program. It works like that in many other disciplines. Artists would make sketches before painting the picture, engineers make blueprints etc.

I think that the reason why literal programming doesn't work is because unlike a sketch or a blueprint, one has to carry it on forever (and propagate back the changes, once they are discovered) as long as the code is being worked on. It probably would've worked better if it was some sort of a plan that can be abandoned at any point, something to give the development the initial push, but not requiring any further maintenance.