Coding on Paper

Coding as a process, not a product

When I was a young mathematics student, one of my first university courses was “Introduction to Programming,” where the computer scientists in our faculty threw us, innocent and naive mathematicians, straight into the deep water.

In the Eastern school system, we believe in immediately applying pressure so intense that it weeds out the unworthy faster than they can chug their welcome drinks at the regular semester launch parties. So, fifteen minutes into the first lecture, we were dereferencing pointers left and right, because everything else was trivial. At least, according to our professor. (By the way, this was the same in our math courses. The first sentence of our linear algebra class was “let F be a field, then V is a vector space over F if…,” leaving our heads spinning.)