On 12/19/2011 1:35 PM, bearophile wrote:
Given the amount of time it takes to punch the cards, waiting for your turn to run the program, and reading the printouts, I think punchcards also teach you to use your brain first and to think before doing/trying things, instead of going by trial and error. Trial and error is an efficient strategy only if you have interactive tools that speedup the cycle and the problems to solve are not too much hard.
I've never seen any evidence that punchcards made one a better programmer. For sure, one wrote far fewer programs, and infinitely shorter ones, with punchcards, and so simply lack of experience would make one worse.
As a programmer who initially learned with punchcards, using an interactive tty is far, far, FAR more productive.
And using a full screen editor is another HUGE jump in productivity. Ditto for going to big screens and multiple windows.
There are many things I miss about the olden days of programming, but punchcards, paper tape, and ASR-33 teletypes are not among them. While I'm at it, cassette tapes, floppies and modems I always hated and am glad to be done with.
