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Comment by AWildC182 | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't make my worst enemy try to program without the internet...

Programming without the internet isn’t hard. It’s like driving without a GPS. You have to commit more to memory, or, you know, use offline resources.

Ah, working through K&R was such a pleasant time, back in undergrad.

Which book?

They’re referring to K&R’s The C Programming Language [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language

I got started with python via a book on a plane, no computer, no internet (a looong time ago)...

Did similar once... but hadn't run through the first setup piece where it ran through installing all the dependencies for the approach in the book.

Which (obviously) couldn't work, as there was no way to download those dependencies mid-flight.

Made some progress with the book during the flight, but it was mostly theoretical rather than being able to do the things. ;)

My introduction to programming in the 90's was a phonebook-sized tome called "Learn Visual C++ in 12 easy lessons" or something like that. It came with a CD with Microsoft Visual C++ 1.0. For some reason, it didn't work; I couldn't compile hello world.

So I learned C++ just by reading the book, learning all about complicated object oriented features without ever having written any code. About six months later or so I got access to a Borland C++ compiler, and at that point I could actually do stuff.

It's possible to learn to program that way if you don't have any better alternative, but it's not a path I'd recommend if you do.

If you're able to set things up beforehand, it's not even that hard to get crutches like offline copies of Stackoverflow and Wikipedia via DB dumps

I learned to program without the Internet. There was just a blocky image on the TV, a rubber keyboard, and 16K of RAM. The overwhelming majority of the available memory resided in the programmer's head.

While I'd never consider trying to impose that approach on someone, I'd certainly suggest it. It really encourages attention to detail and total focus, which are increasingly valuable skills these days.

Yeah, but you can't provide the Internet because there are those who will use it to coordinate crimes. So that leaves choices:

* No programming

* Programming with no Internet

Preload it with books.

Dave Beazley did it AND talked about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8

Summary: he was involved in patent litigation and had to analyse a codebase on a computer locked in a vault. He couldn't bring in any electronics but he did discover that Python was installed on the machine he was using. The video describes the rest.

How about providing web access through remote desktop that has a browser with websockets, flash, and non-GET requests disabled and only retrieving pages through a squid cache?

Sounds like it'd be a variable result. eg depending on the skill and personality of the person involved, over time they may or may not learn to exploit that system too.

They could just solicited donations of programming books for prison libraries. There are a few million prisoners in America, getting one programing book for every ten prisoners would only mean a few hundred thousand books. I'm sure that many could be scrounged up. That's really not that many books in the grand scheme of things. And for such a worthy cause, I'm sure you wouldn't have trouble finding people to donate a book.

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