[chias]

When I was younger people derided us new junior developers who relied on compiling and running their code to see what it would do, instead of thinking deeply about it. Using a REPL is a sure sign of a weak mind.

I feel like every 15 years or so you can just find-and-replace the name of the tech we decide is only for Not Real Programmers.

[readthenotes1]

I had a boss who could program machine code directly into memory using the switches on the front panel

God knows what he thought about me

[y1n0]

I mean, to be fair, that's actually a lot easier than dealing with the giant mess of infrastructure and tooling people have to understand today. And yes I've "programmed" machine code through toggle switches on a front panel.

[kamaal]

>>instead of thinking deeply about it.

Around a decade back, I was doing lots of work on 8-bit microcontrollers, and a fairly old programmer taught me how it was done. And I learned a lot from the approach.

Honestly speaking I had to do lots of paper work, and lots of incremental thinking on paper, testing the ideas along the way.

I'm guessing if you didn't have the print statement or a web page as an output, this is just how you work anyway.

The code did come insanely efficient and bug free. Its not for web dev, but there are its use cases.

[rixed]

According to the legend, when Ken Thompson was shown vi, which was the first full screen code editor on Unix, he replied, in essence : "who needs to see other lines than the edited one?"

[tbrownaw]

I've gotten lazy and do that far too often. But yes, it's better to only use actually running it to verify that it does why I already know it'll do.