Coding on Paper: Coding as a Process, Not a Product

Tivadar Danka Nov 04, 2025

As a young mathematics student, my inaugural university course was "Introduction to Programming." The computer science faculty wasted no time, immediately immersing us, a group of innocent and naive mathematicians, into the deep end of the subject.

Our Eastern European educational system operates on the principle of immediate, intense pressure, designed to swiftly identify and filter out those less suited to the rigorous academic demands, often before they've even had a chance to settle in. Consequently, barely fifteen minutes into our very first lecture, we found ourselves grappling with pointer dereferencing, a topic presented as trivial by our professor, leaving little room for foundational concepts.

This demanding approach wasn't unique to programming; our mathematics courses followed a similar pattern. For instance, our linear algebra class commenced with "let F be a field, then V is a vector space over F if…," which often left us feeling overwhelmed.

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