Why do people who plainly want ton be read persist in creating web pages with light grey text on a white background. It's irritating to read.
Paper is dead, long live paper programming
41–50 of 89 posts
Re: Paper is dead, long live paper programming
#42I often like to write out programs by hand (in some sort of pseudocode or whatever language I'm currently using) on "paper", except that "paper" is GoodNotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. The benefit is that I can move things around after I write them. So, I can insert lines, indent or un-indent blocks, or move code into a subroutine. I can also easily add little diagrams. It's really opens up a new way of thinking! It's gotten to the point where when I'm at a whiteboard, I have the urge to rearrange stuff minority-report-style, until I remember that it's not a huge iPad.
Re: Paper is dead, long live paper programming
#43His handwriting is gorgeous!
Most of us think writing code by hand is incredibly slow, because it is. If you add in trying to make it beautiful, now you're really crawling.
Slower than typing, yes. However, I'll take APL by hand over Python which is commonly viewed as terse if I could think in APL as well as the author.
Re: Paper is dead, long live paper programming
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what the author was looking for.
"hey guys, i like to write code IN 18TH CENTURY STYLE CURSIVE THAT I HAVE PAINSTAKINGLY MASTERED."
"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis": https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re: Paper is dead, long live paper programming
#45I used to write algorithms and solutions to my Delphi programs in paper when I was bored at school, in 2009/2010. It was very cool to think a great solution and write it. But for learning programming it is awfull and I don't know why universities still insist in using this method in classes and exams.
Re: Paper is dead, long live paper programming
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do all my coding in gregg shorthand
I know this was a joke, but do you by any chance know any shorthand? I tried to teach myself Gregg here and there years ago, but it requires more dedication than I was willing to put in to become fluent.
Gregg is not the way to go if you're looking for a shorthand
that captures text in the way you would need for programming or science and I don't know of a good shorthand for this [if it wasn't already APL.]
Gregg is very much a "visible" sound system from a time when people just needed to capture the conversations and later expand back into text with the aid of a secretary. That is, if you didn't mutate your shorthand for your own purposes.
That being said, Aaron Hsu's handwriting is beautiful, but not my cup of tea for thinking on paper--my initial reaction to his scanned pages was unpleasant because it wasn't what I was used to from my own hands.
Re: Paper is dead, long live paper programming
#47I participated in a few programming competitions in college where paper programming is a must. There are typically 3 members on each team but only one computer. Our strategy involved first finding the easiest problem in the set and handing it over to our fastest typer to solve. In parallel, the other 2 members ranked and categorized (graph search, DP, arithmetic, etc.) the remaining problems. We then proceeded to spl…
I'm highly interested to know what class of "common mistakes" you are referring to here. This sounds like a very fun environment/method to do things.
Over time, I got used to catching off-by-one errors in loops as well as assignment to incorrect variables of the same type.
But when I write code in an editor, these errors always pop up. I guess it's because the feedback loop is so small, whereas every second counts in a competition environment.
Yes, it was pretty fun. I wish I took it more seriously though: we never really practiced much and just attended competitions for the experience. We did manage to get 5th place twice in a row in a regional competition (Gulf), so we weren't terrible :P
Re: Paper is dead, long live paper programming
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do all my coding in gregg shorthand
I know this was a joke, but do you by any chance know any shorthand? I tried to teach myself Gregg here and there years ago, but it requires more dedication than I was willing to put in to become fluent.
I know teeline. But programming in it seems pretty silly since half the time you are only differentiating the meaning of words using sentence context. I do like the idea of using it for maybe some very basic terms in psuedocode though (if, for, define, class, etc)
Re: Paper is dead, long live paper programming
#49Re: Paper is dead, long live paper programming
#50Backspace was what moved me away from paper when I was a kid. I can't go back to paper programming, the ability to cleanly delete anything I messed up is ingrained in me. I admire if somebody still keeps the art of 0 mistakes going!