Compute!'s Gazette was my "GitHub of the 80s" for my Commodore machines. It was absolutely a wild ride, typing in programs from the back to do everything from games and word processing and who knows what. IIRC, they began with BASIC, but then they essentially bootstrapped a foolproof, checksummed machine-code editor and, somewhat regrettably, cut out the source-code middleman.

The punchline is that I did not necessarily have any way of saving those programs to persistent storage, so it was just like... keep the computer turned on for a week?

Most coders learn so much from hacking on other people's code, it's an indispensable step. So typing in code is a great opportunity to experience coding, starting with a working codebase, and perhaps making your own tweaks, fixes, and enhancements. Commodore BASIC was perfect for rapid prototyping and access to sound and graphics primitives.