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I know this is not answering your question, but... I strongly recommend against printing code, why? You lose facilities like: goto source, search/replace, modi
by aljgz 6y ago
I know this is not answering your question, but...
I strongly recommend against printing code, why?
You lose facilities like: goto source, search/replace, modifications (I might modify/format a piece of code temporarily, to help me understand it better, might rename functions, variables, add lines to visually separate parts of code, etc) and many more.
You re-enforce your discomfort with reading/writing code on the screen. I'm trying to assume different reasons that you might have to learn a code and for all of them that I can imagine, you'll be better off as someone who feels at home with the screen. So I suggest you to resist this temptation and do what you ultimately will do.
Out of curiosity, Is your job/situation/skills in a way that being good with screen will not seriously benefit you? How?
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago"You can't grep dead trees." - The Jargon File
- cpach 6y agoAnd you can’t alt-tab to HN on a sheet of paper ;-)
- smlckz 6y agoI do not know how OP would be benefited from printing code, but I had to print my C code to submit as a school project.
- vlmutolo 6y agoI’m comfortable reading code on a screen. I just thought it would be interesting to try printing out a whole library as a packet to get a good understanding of it as a first pass. You’re right that you lose a lot of tooling on paper. But you can always have your laptop alongside the packet. No need for either/or. Plus, I have found that I retain things better when they’re printed out. I also like to mark up documents in pen. At the end of the day, it’s just a preference thing. And paper might actually work for the use case of just trying to understand a library; the code is static in that situation.