Comment by wombat-man
19 hours ago
we only had a black and white printer, I don't think they would spring for color. Also, iirc he had a script he had us run to print it, so it' not like we were printing straight from the editor.
19 hours ago
we only had a black and white printer, I don't think they would spring for color. Also, iirc he had a script he had us run to print it, so it' not like we were printing straight from the editor.
RIP vim `:hardcopy` :( .
For some harder C code (implementing `malloc` for example) my preferred debugging method was printing out the code and debugging it with a pen between classes.
I eventually realized being inside an editor gave me too much attraction to thrash with "just one more quick iteration & debug run..." and could actually end up more time consuming than being forced to reconcile my mental model with what I had already written by me double checking my assumptions.
Interestingly, some of my peers started picking up the habit for their own projects and we ended up having small "debugging" sessions by trading print-outs .
This is interesting. For a while I used to print out code and debug too - more due to resource constraints: didn't own a computer, and my high school's computers were available only for limited hours per day. I used to code my first iteration also on paper - so that in the limited computer use time, I could type in the code quickly and actually see it run. Wild times but I think it made me good at programming. My friend (who did have a computer at home, but lived far away) and I co-wrote a program called "graph generator" that could plot math functions, with me doing my share on paper and giving to him to type in :) This was in the Turbo C++ IDE and since GUI based programs were unusual (at least as a project in highschool - India, 1999) it temporarily made us popular. Well, wow, that was fun to reminisce!
Even in 2010 at Berkeley I was doing a fair amount of paper coding. Some of the professors gave paper-only tests, and we'd practice a bit since you didn't want a midterm to be the first time you had to do it.
Though I also remember sketching programs on paper as a teenager for my TI-83, since it was annoying to type everything out and then have to make a bunch of edits.