[xdennis]

I did that too. I thought it was common. I learned programming by reading my older sister's Computer Science manual from high school in preparation for me starting high school (2004, Romania).

All school work was on paper so it was a necessity.

But it was fun too. In pointless classes like French, there was nothing better to do. It was worthwhile to work on my personal programs on paper and type them out when I got home.

You had to think about the approach before starting to write it down. I would leave a lot of vertical space in case I needed to put something above. In some cases I would write the code afterwards, draw a rectangle around it, and point to where it needed to move. It was a bit messy sometimes.

[a96]

I did that, too. Maybe age 6/7. Didn't get a computer myself until I was maybe 11. I learned from library books and ported and modified the tutorial programs for a class mates computer. Pen and paper, what else was there? It was fun and the logic of it was really interesting, but it didn't go very far with the information and equipment of the day (or following decades). What other people found weird was mostly that I wasn't interested in games which is apparently what home computers were for.

I often wonder what life would have been like if I had got some processor architecture manuals and microcontrollers early on. I've only specialized in embedded systems much later in life and spent my earlier life doing other, somewhat adjacent, things.