Comments on: Dead-listing while on vacation

By: Software Engineer

Software Engineer — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 08:50:07 +0000

In my opinion programming in paper has its own value.

By: web design

web design — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:10:34 +0000

its interesting noting the tasks where printouts are much better than computers. i find it usually breaks down to annotation; if i need to mark something up a printer is usually the only way.

By: A reader

A reader — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:20:22 +0000

Thank you very much for this article.
Very very refreshing in today’s software climate.

By: Grimtooth

Grimtooth — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:11:46 +0000

It wasn’t strictly dead-listing, since I was also able to use an assembly-level debugger to check things out, but years ago I had the job of reverse-engineering the newest release of the Avid video-editing suite so we could get around their attempts to restrict usage to only their own branded storage systems. We were doing our own high-performance Fibre Channel shared storage marketed primarily to film/video houses, so it was critical that we could work with the Avid stuff. It was a intense week or so of nothing but tracing and disaassembly, and I’ve still got my binder-clipped stack of I don’t know how many pages of raw assembly code covered in my notes and conjectures and hand-decompilations. It was a blast…completely took me back to trying to crack games and beef up my Ultima stats and such in the old Apple II days.

By: Nate Lawson

Nate Lawson — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 02:54:27 +0000

Thanks, I enjoyed writing a more lighthearted post. I’ve written a lot of code on paper, starting from 6502 asm for a joystick handling routine in the back leaf of a textbook.

I think paper is a great way to write some kinds of routines or outline a new algorithm. So much so that I include a written programming question in all interviews I perform. It’s a great balancer to verbal questions since you can leave the coder alone to concentrate. Also, you get to see their mistakes and rejected attempts along the way which gives good insight into thought processes.

By: Rui Paulo

Rui Paulo — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:17:30 +0000

Hi Nate. I really enjoyed reading this post. I never realized reading assembly code could be so thrilling. :-)
I also find your quote about hexadecimal conversions by hand interesting. Most students nowadays don’t understand the value of programming in paper and knowing how the bases work. So, let me tell you a story. :-) When I was younger my parents forbidden me to use the computer for any task because my grades were low. I wasn’t actually playing games at the time, but learning to program in C. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t use the computer that I started writing code in a piece of paper. They didn’t bother because I think they though I was studying, ;-). At first, it all seemed wrong, but I soon realized I was much more concentrated than if I was in front of the computer.

I wish I could, but I can’t attend Blackhat 2008. Good luck with your talk!
Have a nice summer!