Comment by sethhochberg

I had a data structures / algorithms professor in college who would occasionally ask us to write C++ by hand, on paper, during exams.

Syntax wasn't really graded, its forgivable to make trivial syntax errors on pen and paper. The questions never covered more than a few dozen lines of code. But doing it this way forced us to really actually hold an entire small problem in our heads instead of just whatever slice of it the IDE was helping us focus on at the time and I think developing some of that skillset ended up being hugely useful to me when I started my career and was jumping into codebases far larger than I'd ever navigated before.

Jump-to-definition and search for symbols in RubyMine/IDEA are some of my most used tools today, but I think I'd probably be a worse programmer if I never had to develop the skill of working without them to a certain extent. I'd encourage everyone to give it a shot next time you have a few minutes to sharpen the saw. Grab a yellow legal pad and write a little toy parser/lexer for a toy programming language you just invented.

FWIW: I also love printing out diffs for nontrivial code reviews and marking them up with pen and paper, particularly big SQL views.