Well, we used to do that in college in... 2005, 2006, etc. We had a lab once a week, but we wrote and debugged programs in Pascal, C, x86 ASM, Microchip ASM by

Well, we used to do that in college in... 2005, 2006, etc. We had a lab once a week, but we wrote and debugged programs in Pascal, C, x86 ASM, Microchip ASM by hand. We wrote stuff for the Intel 8251, 8253, 8255, 8257, 8259 (to handle interruptions and do serial communication, etc). We'd go line by line and change the relevant registers, arrays, pointers, counters, etc. Exams consisted of doing that, too. Sometimes you're given a piece of code and asked about the state at a certain break point. Sometimes you're given a succession of register values an asked what the program is doing. A missing semicolon had a direct influence on your grade, not on stdout. It's not guaranteed that it produces excellent programmers, but one can learn a lot and it was almost a meditation to focus like that and ask yourself "Why isn't it running?". It was cool (at least for me, I disassembled programs as a teenager and I had a computer, but I still think this was useful).