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Comment by falcor84 | Hacker News Reader

I really have no idea what you're talking about. I absolutely hated paper. The inconvenience of wanting to add some content higher up the page and having to redo the whole page to achieve that was infuriating to me. I for one am quite pleased that I no longer have as many violent urges when I'm composing text.

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True. However the inflexibility of the physical media (pen/typewriter+paper) forced people to think and plan before they acted. These days, not so much, and I can see the difference in approach when my kids are writing essays - back in the day we were taught to come up with a little plan, toc, etc before getting down to the details. Now my kids just spit it out without structure, then add bits an pieces here and there and call it done. Maybe they are taught the structural approach in scool, but the tools aren't helping.

It's called agile essay writing.

There is Agile Technical Writing.

https://www.drexplain.com/press/articles/agile_technical_wri...

I'm old enough to have typed papers in my youth. It sucked because you had to write it twice, one draft by hand, then type it up. When you were drafting you had to physically cut and paste, with scissors and tape. It was annoying and didn't improve workflow at all.

This is like complaining about interactive terminals because programmers no longer have to think so hard about their code before writing it out to punch cards....

I think you mean writing it out on coding sheets before sending it to the "girls" to be punched onto card's

That was so early 1960s. In the mid 60s to the mid 70s, you had to mostly do it yourself unless you were really senior and still programming.

Well in the early 80's I entered fortran code that an Engineer had written onto coding sheets for our two phase flow simulator

And I suspect that this went on longer in traditional big iron shops.

Typewriters weren't the right tool for composing text, although there were some successful people that made it work, especially at offices or newspapers.

Knuth still does use a pencil and paper, as far as I know. He only types the manuscript in Emacs once he has composed it.

And more than just for academic papers: TeX was hand written in full on yellow legal pad, and then typed into the full-screen editor.

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