I have heard endless wailing and howling from students when they were asked to write a computer program on paper. They always claim that it is ridiculous as you will never need to write a program without a computer, that it is too hard and that they cannot debug their code that way.

I've always liked doing that. In fact, about 6 months before I received my computer I wrote a 3000 line application on paper for some graphics software I wanted to create. Now do take note that I have never really programmed before, so when I finally managed to implement the code on the computer, it was only about 60% accurate.

I like doing that because it forces you to stop and think about what you are doing. It forces you to do manual code review, to play through algorithms and state tables in your head. Programming that way, even when done on a computer, consistently produces better quality applications.

Imagine now how awesome Alan Turing was. More than a decade before the first computer was created, he wrote a computer algorithm that implemented the game of chess. And it worked well enough to take Gary Kasparov 16 moves to check mate it. Respect!