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Comment by ianmcgowan | Hacker News Reader

Really puts the auto- in didact! Very curious to hear how this worked for you; it’s almost directly the opposite of the copilot approach.

I learned assembler by typing in listings from magazines and hand dis-assembling and debugging on paper. Your approach seems similar in spirit, but who has the times these days?

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I learned this from Zed Shaw's Learn X The Hard Way books. He says this approach is mainstream in other disciplines, like music, languages, or martial arts.

I also heard the philosopher Ken Wilber spent a few years (in what kids today call Monk Mode) writing out great books by hand.

The main effect I noticed is that I rapidly gain muscle memory in a new programming language, library or codebase.

The other effect is that I'm forced to round-trip every token through my brain, which is very helpful as my eyes tend to glaze over — often I'll be looking right at an obvious bug without seeing it.

Just to add to your point, both Mozart and Chopin were known to hand copy JS Bach's well tempered clavier preludes and fugues

I program in neovim with no plugins, no autocomplete and no syntax highlighting. I type everything myself (though I will use copy and paste from time to time). There is a discipline to it that I find very beneficial. As a language designer, it also makes me think very carefully about the syntactic burden of languages that I design. It keeps my languages tight. One of the nice things about typing all of my own code without suggestions is that it eliminates many distractions. I may get some things wrong from time to time, but then I only have myself to blame. And I never waste time messing around with broken plugin configs or irritating syntax highlighting nits.

It's not for everyone but I love it.

I program most languages like this, in emacs.

Yeah these features are overrated. You can still autocomplete based on existing words in the same file by pressing Ctrl+N, but otherwise just typing it out or copying is totally OK.

I've also experienced autocomplete in NetBeans IDE so slow that it was just faster to type it out.

I quite value syntax highlighting though. Back then I used Turbo Pascal 5.5 on PC XT because it was way faster and less demanding than Turbo Pascal 6.0, but I remember not having a syntax highlighting was quite worse experience. You could get used to do without though.

But it also depends on the language. I've seen some Lua code without syntax highlighting and it was just a soup of words, very unreadable. Whereas something like C with symbols is OK.

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