Pen and paper coder

Eli
Eli
Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read

Recently I’ve — finally ! hallelujah ! — started to read Asimov’s Foundation series, and as I keep devouring this marvelous piece of literature I can’t stop thinking about the concept of transitions in History.

Reminder for those who haven’t read the book yet : basically, the author describes a situation, then jumps to another situation 50 years after the first one, and so on. Some references in the conversations between the protagonists help the reader filling the historical gaps, but a lot of details remain unsolved. And it’s absolutely brilliant.

Okay, so, why are transitions even interesting ? Well, they are because they are subtle. And subtlety is a concept that human brain, along with the History books, doesn’t always appreciate. Human History is simply too dense and too long to be held in our limited minds. So we tend to forget things, in order to synthesize (would I dare to say “minify” ?) life to an endurable version.

Have you ever realized that Chopin, Pushkin, Poe and Balzac were all alive together at some point ? More mind-blowing discoveries here.

In the coding field, one of these slightly forgotten things is the paper-to-computer transition.

A famous illustration of the use of paper is this gorgeous photography of Margaret Hamilton, who led the software engineering division at MIT for the Apollo project (1969) :

By the way, Margaret was only 33 back then. GG, Margaret.

The big stack of printed matter Hamilton is standing next to is actually the code she wrote on a typewriter to take humanity to the moon.

“Disconnected techniques” were not only used for software development. The few school students who studied computer science in USSR used pencils and notebooks to learn programming :

15-year-old kids learning to code in 1986. Take a look at the full video here if you enjoy soviet vintage (personally, I doooo).

Ironically, today, a lot of tech companies ask applicants to write code on paper during interviews — which is a nightmare for a lot of millennials.

Oh subtlety, subtlety…

CodeImaginarium

Coding with storytelling : the blog of a Raspberry Pi who eat a typewriter for breakfast.

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Eli

Written by

Eli

Instructional design + web dev + fiction = ❤

CodeImaginarium

Coding with storytelling : the blog of a Raspberry Pi who eat a typewriter for breakfast.

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