A professor collaborator of mine has the habit of saying "that does not parse", or "that does not type-check" to nonsensical sentences uttered by clueless research students (full disclosure, that set includes me). At first I found it somewhat weird, but now I've grown to respect it. It totally makes sense.

I remember in high school (when I was already a proficient programmer, but still within-grade in the other sciecnes), struggling with some hard physics problems, and running to my dad for help: he would always say: "dimensional analysis". If only I had connected the dots: doing "dimensional analysis" in your work is _exactly_ the same as type-checking your manually executed paper algorithm. This lightbulb went off in my head approximately a decade too late...