I really don't understand the hate that whiteboard coding has on HN. In Germany, this is used a lot in the programming tutorials on universities. It's not that

I really don't understand the hate that whiteboard coding has on HN. In Germany, this is used a lot in the programming tutorials on universities. It's not that there isn't a projector in about any larger seminar room. But most exercise instructor will strongly prefer whiteboard coding for explaining how to design an algorithm that solves the given exercise. The strong advantage is that you can easily draw pictures at some other corner of the whiteboard that illustrate the idea of the algorithm lines that you just wrote. This is also the preferred way for students to explain their implementation of the exercises. They could easily just show the source code on their laptop that they implemented. But I (and many other students and exercise instructors) see that the explanations are a lot more easy to follow if they have to build their implementation step by step on the whiteboard explaining their ideas thereby. On the other hand, if you have no idea how to solve the algorithm you can still write a skeleton of the algorithm and draw pictures by the sides to show where problems might occur. Most exercise instructors would say that only really good students are able to directly write an algorithm down into the computer. On the other hand, any student should be able to draw, say, a flowchart, of the algorithm. If you have done that (and are confident that it looks correct), then you can write a code snippet next to each box of the flowchart that implements (this is only one example. There are exercise instructors that prefer other ways than flowcharts. For example when you instead use recursion, there are other, better, methods). This way you wrote down an algorithm using the flowchart as an intermediate abstraction to simplify the problem. It might be that in the US a different way is used to teach programming (I really don't know which). Also in the internship whiteboards were regularly used when discussing about the best way to implement an algorithm (in about the same way they were used in the programming tutorials with the only difference that once everybody understood the idea, all got back to their computer to implement the algorithm). I never had to whiteboard code anything in job interviews, though. So I really claim that I wouldn't be really worse in whiteboard coding than if I were coding on a computer. I also have reasoned why whiteboard coding is a lot more comfortable in particular in the case when you don't have an idea how the complete algorithm even has to look like (than things that you can be done on a whiteboard, as drawing pictures, drawing flowcharts or writing down recursion equations can badly be done directly in a source code editor). Thus the only explanation that I have for the (nearly) universal hate of whiteboard coding on HN is that many people (me too) have difficulties writing code under stress situations (say, job interview). But this also applies if you write the code on a computer. Thus I believe the hate on whiteboard coding is rather a scapegoat for a lack of programming skills. If it were replaced by another method of a systematic assessment of programming skills, they wouldn't fare better (they just wouldn't have the scapegoat of whiteboard coding anymore).