Notebooks
A great deal of fawning over notebooks and pens happens on the internet. Curiously it happens most with people more than competent with a computer. Gus Mueller, software developer, on notebooks:
I learned a long time ago that the two best debugging tools I own are a nice piece of paper, and a good pencil.
I don’t know whether Gus means this literally but if you’ve been in an exam that required writing code to answer questions you’ll know a flattened tree is pretty fucking useless when it comes to debugging. No doubt it’s great for working through easily visualised problems like trigonometry but the best debugging tool? I disagree.
Like Neven I don’t get notebooks. Despite all the UIs I’ve created, programming problems I’ve solved and hundreds of words I write a day, I manage without a notebook, it’s possible.
They’re impractical, laborious to fill out, the contents completely inflexible once recorded, they’re impossible to organise, aren’t searchable, sharable or able to be backed up.
I think it’s a romantic idea — a rugged intellectual in a world where no one reads let alone writes. In lives dominated by computers people like to think the raw materials of a notebook and pen are still the best way, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not.