Agreed. A good way to get better at coding is to go completely offline without any books or help whatsoever. Write as much code as you can from memory and try to solve your problem with your own existing knowledge.
Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code
81–90 of 184 posts
Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code
#82[deleted]
Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code
#83Site's back, woot!
Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code
#84This is so true. After 20 years, I've recently switched from csh to bash (so I can use rvm), and I've been applying this neuro-hack to less-used command. When you copy-and-paste, there's a kind of finger-learning that you miss out on.
Absolutely. Learning to play a guitar, for example, is difficult and yet crazily creative for this reason. It is (almost) completely behind finger-learning and thus in many original forms each with a signature of the individual who created the piece.
"Great ideas originate in the muscles." - Thomas Edison
Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen that too, but also seen that it the effect isn't quite as dramatic when typing vs. writing.
it's odd but in my experience I have found it to be the opposite. Perhaps because I've grown up with keyboards I find typing something out to be quite stimulating. When writing things down I find there is a huge disconnect between the funny scribbilous motions of my wrist and the meaning of the words they produce. Although perhaps that's a left-handed thing.
Typing your code out is one of the most joyful and zen things about programming. That's just me I guess.
Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code
#86Multiple times I've heard the same advise for copy writing. As in, I've heard a few people tell stories of digging out the works of great copy writers and hand-transcribing dozens or even hundreds of them in pen while taking notes along the way. "Here is the call to action. Here is where he's adding urgency."
Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code
#87The way I learn math and physics is to write out every equation. I can nod at something I don't fully understand and move on, but I have great difficulty writing something I don't understand and moving on.
Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code
#88In the old days of tape drives (at best) hooked up to our TRS80s, Commodores, and the like. The only way to run programs in popular magazines at the time was to type them in. If you didn't have storage and wanted to try the program again, you typed it in again.
It was a pain, but certainly learned things (like how poor / slow a typist you might be).
This slow process allowed you time to see and think about what was going on.
Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code
#89OK, so: > This website uses CloudFlare in order to help keep it online when the server is down by serving cached copies of pages when they are unavailable. Unfortunately, a cached copy of the page you requested is not available, but you may be able to reach other cached pages on the site. I'm probably being significantly thick-headed, but what exactly is Cloudflare even doing if it's not properly caching pages before…
The website in question might not have proper Cache-Control headers, so the page may have never gone into the cache.
[deleted]
Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code
#90In the old days of tape drives (at best) hooked up to our TRS80s, Commodores, and the like. The only way to run programs in popular magazines at the time was to type them in. If you didn't have storage and wanted to try the program again, you typed it in again. It was a pain, but certainly learned things (like how poor / slow a typist you might be). This slow process allowed you time to see and think about what was g…
I also did that but learned a great deal less than I could have. The already hard-to-read code of the machine's BASIC implementations (two-letter variable names, tops) was further mangled by being compressed to fit into the magazine, to say nothing of the programs that were basically just machine code written in hex.
I picked up a few ideas, but you didn't really get the sense of what the program was doing in most cases.