Coding the Old-Fashioned Way

My first programming experience was in Computer Math class back in High School. It was taught by Mr. “write this down and never forget it” Gray. Mr. Gray was a witty guy, but he wasn’t Mr. Witty. Mr. Witty was the Biology teacher, but he was actually kind of loony. But he wasn’t Mr. Looney. Mr. Looney was the calculus teacher, and he, simply put, was a bad ass.

One day, one of the guys in the gym was getting cocky after benching 300 for the first time. “Oh yeah, that’s nice,” says the 50-something Mr. Looney. Then plops 350 on the bar and knocks out 10 quick reps like a hot knife through butter. He then got up and casually strolled out the gym while we all tried to find our jaws on thre floor.

So the rules of thumb were, you never goofed around in Mr. Looney’s class, you never dozed off during Mr. Witty’s week-long lecture on photosynthesis, and you never ever ever got on one of Mr. Gray’s computers before checking and double-checking your code by hand.

I didn’t learn to program back in the Jurassic period when everything was done on punch cards. No, I learned later during the Cretaceous period when programs were run on mainframes. You had to dial your AT&T standard black rotary phone endlessly until you finally got a connection. Then you placed the phone’s handset into the modem cradle and you were up and running, ready to enter your FORTRAN or BASIC program.

Kind of.

If you made an entry error in your program, sometimes you had to start back at the beginning. Other times you got logged off completely and had to dial up again. Anyone nostalgic for those days must be daft. But the key point was that our school had a limited number of minutes per month, and the fastest way to a bad grade was to waste Mr. Gray’s time on the mainframe. So all code was written by hand and run only when you were as sure as possible that it would compile and run correctly.

Last night I was tired of sitting in front of the computer, but I didn’t feel like knocking off for the evening. So I grabbed a stack of paper and a pen and sat down in the family room, coding the old fashioned way. I’ve got to say it was great. There’s something about stepping away from the PC that helps focus attention and separate you from distractions.

I wrote several hundred lines of code, and when I was done it looked like a mess. There were strikeouts and arrows and itty bitty lines of code squeezed between other lines of code and wrapping around the edge of the paper. But I understood it. When I entered it in today, it ran. First time. No errors. I lifted my coffee cup in salute to Mr. Gray, wherever he might be.