Comment by userbinator

This is probably a controversial opinion, but I think that working in an environment where time-to-iterate is high is actually very beneficial for improving your skills. It's one of those things that may feel overly burdensome in the short term, but is better in the long term. I say this as someone who taught programming with beginners, and observed what many of them will do when given an IDE, which at the scale of the code they're writing, makes the time-to-iterate very short (press a key and you instantly see your changes). They end up getting into a "dopamine feedback loop" that causes them to continually make tiny changes and rebuild/run, and the code written as a result of this looks exactly like what you'd expect: it barely works, and is full of redundancies, "dead ends", and other evidence that its author was probably not thinking of anything more than the next line or two when writing it.

In other words, reducing the iteration time reduces the motivation to get it right the first time, and the associated deep reasoning/"mental execution" skills which are required to do so. In order to develop those skills, one should strive to write as much code as possible before running it, and a high iteration time assists with that.

Also, I'm tempted to continue the title with "...unless it's APL".