[jon-wood]

I dropped out of college (the UK version, I guess equivalent to senior high school in the US) shortly after discovering that the final assessment of my Computing project would be performed by the examiner reading a printed version of the source code, without ever executing it, because the exam board were so scared of examiners computers being destroyed.

[alfiedotwtf]

You haven’t lived life until you’ve sat a Data Structures and Algorithms exam having to write all coding solutions with paper and pen

[mghackerlady]

When was this? If this was before virtualisation was common I can maybe understand that but any time in the last 20 years is pretty dumb and the last 10 so braindead I question if they would've been able to judge things properly

[jon-wood]

Oh this was in 2000, when virtualisation was only just becoming accessible so I can get of get the justification. It still made the entire exercise in writing some software feel pointless when I knew it would never get executed by anyone but myself.

[L_226]

Reminds me of Lord Vetinari from Discworld, reading sheet music instead of listening to adulterated performances by fat sweaty men squeezing the music through some tubes.

Executing the code in your head removed from the nuances of hardware, CPU architecture and compiler versions seems like a virtuous pursuit (?)

[zbentley]

> Executing the code in your head removed from the nuances of hardware, CPU architecture and compiler versions seems like a virtuous pursuit

…and that’s how we got Java :p

And stuff like Pascal, too, so it’s not all bad.