Comment by alphazard

Part of the mismatch here is that people discover programming languages as tools for thinking, maybe better than any other thinking tool they've ever encountered, and with the unique ability to verify one's thinking. Then they want to do all their thinking with this tool, including all of their design.

IME this leads you to consider more and more featureful languages which are worse and worse at actually building software, and never match the flexibility of a tool like pen and paper.

Poor design is your own fault. Write more, draw more, prototype more. You may need to develop your own notation, you may need to get better at drawing or invest in a drawing tool. You may need to learn another programming language, which you use only for prototyping.

The design of your system does not need to be perfectly represented in your source code. The source code needs to produce runnable machine code, which behaves in the ways that your design dictates, and that's the only link between the design, the code, and the running system. Programming languages today are pretty good at producing working software, but not very good at doing that and designing systems and communicating designs and documenting choices, etc.