As long as we're on this subject, I'd like to strongly encourage programmers to adopt a "pen-and-paper" approach to problem solving. Just like mentionned in the article, there are great benefits coming from actually writing down the problem.
For the past year or so, every time I worked on a non-trivial problem, I did it on a sheet of paper. It definitely took discipline at first but now I couldn't do it any other way.
Then I went to university in Amsterdam to study mathematics and they had a computer that was free for students to use!
(Not unlimited though. We were allowed to use something like one second of CPU time per day. :-)
"One second of CPU time per day" got me thinking. Sure there are benefits to having modernly cheap computers, but how did they do it before?
For the past year or so, every time I worked on a non-trivial problem, I did it on a sheet of paper. It definitely took discipline at first but now I couldn't do it any other way.
My motivation for adopting this approach came from reading a blog post by Guido Van Rossum (http://neopythonic.blogspot.fr/2011/07/before-python.html).
"One second of CPU time per day" got me thinking. Sure there are benefits to having modernly cheap computers, but how did they do it before?