alt Hacker NewsIn The Art Of Computer Programming, one of the most influential and comprehensive series of books on the subject, Knuth uses a fictional assembly language called MIX in the examples. The reader does "just run the program in their head."
In Software Tools Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger describe a pseudo-language called RATFOR (Rational Fortran), and then throughout the book implement RATFOR in itself.
Getting feedback while learning to program has a lot of value, but so does learning to think through code in your head. People old enough to remember when you had to wait a day to run your program and get results back (very slow turnaround) know the value of that skill, we used to call it "desk checking" -- reading through your code and running it in your head and on paper.
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Sure it is useful to run code in your head. I didn't say we must not think through code.
But to unable to run actual code at all? Come on. Who learns programming that way?
The newer versions use MMIX which is much closer to ARM assembly.
There's a compiler plugin for gcc, and when I worked through volume 1 I did type the code in and run the exercises.
I found it incredibly useful, but obviously YMMV.