> because of the traditional scarcity of equipment, Russian students and scientists had to think rather than experiment This heavily resonated with me. Early i

> because of the traditional scarcity of equipment, Russian students and scientists had to think rather than experiment This heavily resonated with me. Early in my career (late 90's - early 00's), I had to develop the skill of dry running (basically running a given block of code with given inputs in my head and predicting the outcomes) because of scarcity. I was in a domain where I had to build 100,000+ lines of C++ into a single executable, manually deploy to a remote Solaris machine and wait for up to 5 minutes for system re-initialization before I could run a simple test. Needless to say, we learned to predict what our code does as we wrote it. The idea of unit tests re-running automatically as you write new code in the IDE would have been dismissed as an unattainable heaven (or maybe even considered downright satanic).