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Comment by musiciangames | Hacker News Reader

I worked with a defector from the Soviet Union. He told me the reason Soviet programmers were so good was that they had very limited access to computers. If you had to program using pencil and paper, you wanted to make it work first time. (Coincidentally we were working for Honeywell).

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Alternatively: only people who were into it enough to handle doing things on paper and with limited access to computers kept working afterwards.

So: was it a good way to teach or a good way to filter out less motivated people?

I guess it was at a time when computers weren't ubiquitous as they're today, and an average non-technical person might have never touched one.

In that days, designing on paper was probably just the default mode of working ...

It cannot be the only effect, since this pen-and-paper effect manifests itself in other places: when you kook at old industrial systems' plans (nuclear power plant in the example I have in mind) you're very surprised to see how small the number of revision is for the plans: because it's very tedious to re-do the entire plan from scratch by hand, people used to be extremely cautious when design them. Today with CAD software, revisions are cheap and producing half backed plans that need later correction is the norm.

Maybe the new way of doing thing is still more efficient in the end, but maybe not.

I am an Engineer and have done things both ways throughout my career. What is easy to miss in digital are the overall holistic design and the way it all fits together, because you are always zoomed in on a particular piece of the puzzle and rarely see the whole thing on screen in a meaningful way. There is just something about seeing a full design laid out on paper, spread out on the table, that lets many little things jump out at you.

If it's important print it out, in large format.

A solution to this problem could be that the engineer has to pay for each revision out of his own pocket. Or better yet: everyone involved in the project has a budget for revisions and change requests. I'm just kidding. Or maybe not.

It's only relatively recently (like since the 00's) that CS has become this sexy field due to sky-high salaries (at least in the USA).

Before then filtering out less motivated people wasn't as much of an issue, as they had little incentive to study CS in the first place.

I can attest to this. Once, a college teacher gave us a programming exercise, and then went on to suggest how we might go about solving it.

While he was talking, I started outlining a solution on a piece of paper. At school, I couldn't use a computer during class, so I'd gotten used to programming (and debugging!) on paper.

When I arrived at home, I typed it in and tried it out. Could I possibly reproduce that Multics story I'd read about?

It didn't compile the first time, but after correcting a variable name, it worked perfectly.

I learned on computers where cards and printouts were the I/O system.

I remember a number of years where the edit->compile->print loop was much better with listings than terminals, simply because you couldn't see/navigate/edit your code as efficiently. It eventually improved with better/visual editors, larger terminals and faster compiling and running.

An analogy might be early firearms, where things like wet gunpowder, unreliable flintlocks and pushing everything down the barrel made for an inefficient transition time from the longbow.

When we learned COBOL in high school we did it in pen and paper mostly because the school labs didn't had enough PC's for every student, and we ended up working 3-4 students per computer.

He must have been one of the privileged few with access to pencil and paper then.

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