Paper is dead, long live paper programming

In France, the competitive exams to major schools are not only done on paper, but you have no access to a computer whatsoever.

I was initially surprised at the idea, since it means that errors that can immediately be found on a computer (using a wrong library function, edge conditions on loops, ...) are easy to miss.

I always find writing out my programs (even in pseudocode) before actually attempting to type it out has helped me weed out bugs in the long run. This is especially true as long as whiteboard interviews is still relevant.

Despite me typing pretty fast on a keyboard (~90wpm), writing things out on paper makes me think more carefully, and I don't have to maintain a contextual overhead in pressing the right keys or seeing a red, strong underline for every typo I make. This is also true for non programming related work. It frees my mind into solving the actual thing where typing is just the medium.

Then again, I grew up doing a lot of writing and only got my first iPhone in college. This might be different for kids who interact with iPads in elementary school though.

In 1992 for my final pre-exams deliverable at uni I wrote the entire program text (in Pascal) out on pen and paper overnight, fuelled by cheap lager and Red Bull. Queued at the door waiting for the lab to open in the morning, then typed the lot in and was delighted to discover not only no syntax errors, but no bugs. Ran it, took a few screenshots, printed them and the listing, delivered it to my tutor and went to the pub.

To this day I swear by pen and paper — not for actual code any more, but most specs/designs/flowcharts/pseudocode, and absolutely all meeting and personal notes. I highly value the focus which comes from not being distracted by the quality/features/font/customisation/whatever of some device/app/workflow du jour.

I like this very much - talking about non-simple problems. Coding before typing forces one to think about and solve the problems first. Randomly flipping if-statements won't happen this way.

In many cases this is a faster method, as the amount of debugging can be greatly decreased.

I used notebooks extensively - the harder the problem, the more ink I used. But the huge advantage of paper is the ability to draw diagrams - much easier to review later, and to revise. I am surprised not to see any in these pages.