"These are... [the] originals?? The showed no corrections of any kind. Not one. It's simply written down music that was already finished in his head. As if he w

"These are... [the] originals?? The showed no corrections of any kind. Not one. It's simply written down music that was already finished in his head. As if he were *taking dictation*." I wrote C code by hand. Mind you, I wasn't typing it nor copying it from anywhere. I was writing it, by hand, from my head. Hear me out... I was on the collegiate ACM programming team with Russ Cox and Matt Caywood. The format was you were given like 6 puzzles, 4 hours, and one terminal. Russ insisted we follow this process: 1) One person picks the easiest and gets the terminal. 2) Other two teammates choose two other puzzles and each of us would write our code, by hand, pen and paper. ("The New York Times crossword puzzle is a form of meditation. But doing it in pen if pencil is available is grandstanding." - Glenn O'Brien, from _How to be a Man_) 3) When one was finished, we would acquire the lock on the terminal from the other teammate, transcribe our code, and hit run with our fingers crossed. No collaboration. No cross-talk. 4) Repeat until victory is achieved and your competitors are decimated. (We laughed with no small amount of schadenfreude that the MIT team lost in the regionals because they all stood around their sole terminal, imcomprehensibly bickering at each other.) We got 8th place in the world, so---uhm---thank you Russ for the joy and pain? I wouldn't recommand to any CS student that this slow form of torture is necessary by any means to assert that you are damn fine coder. But, GOD DAMN you feel like a beast when you type C into a terminal, run compile, and it works with no bugs. You get a special satisfaction of bravura and elan that would reduce Salieri to tears reading the scripts of Mozart and realizing there were zero hand-writing errors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfJ0QyiI68c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfJ0QyiI68c (This is historically apocryphal, but makes for great screenwriting.) Through this rigor, you learn something very valuable, albeit something you might learn in more conventional and less tedious ways: You learn always---at least in those fleeting moments---to write correct code at the optimal level of conciseness. Because you simply don't have the time to fiddle around the way you might if you have a fast wpm typing rate, since you write slower than you think. And learn to think faster than you can write. I guess this is similar to the form of discipline you would get when you programmed punch cards and sent them via post, except under time pressure it was blitz chess than punch-card postal chess. And don't get me wrong. I use Jupyter notebooks and putz around a lot these days. I'm too old for some shit, and putzing around is fun.