[ecobiker]

Growing up I didn't have a computer at home. I would write my solutions in a paper, evaluate it mentally/with a pencil a few times, take it to my school or a friend's place and run it; only to find there is an issue. Rinse and repeat. I did this quite a few times and got really good at it. However, none of the languages are intuitive when you are learning it for the first time. You could easily be stuck at the most trivial of things about syntax, scoping, ..etc. Mistakes in a situation like mine are expensive - it usually takes a few days before I could verify again if my solution worked. It's really easy to lose your patience and move on.