When I was learning to code at college, by myself (I did a Business degree), I bought a book on iOS development[0]. This book mandated that you type all the examples out line-by-line. I thought the idea was a pretty silly one, but I stuck with it because I didn't know what I was doing and wanted to learn.

14 years later, as a software engineer, I still think about that book and the way I can trace back a lot of my initial improvements to its requirement that code got written line-by-line. I still maintain the habit of rote text copying as a way to pick up new tools and commands (i.e. copying documentation examples exactly into my editor), and also when people make an assertion like:

> It's like trying to retype calculus solutions — you don't learn from it.

Maybe not everyone learns that way, but I sure did!

[0] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/iPhone-iPad-Apps-Absolute-Beginners...

> you don't learn from it

Except that you do. Otherwise you could just sit in school or university and just listen and do nothing, but that way you just learn A LOT less, instead of taking down the lecture/lesson.

I'm not sure I agree about retyping calculus solutions. I often find that writing out a proof or derivation forces me to engage with some minor detail that I hadn't fully appreciated beforehand. That usually raises productive questions.

Writing reinforces. You won't learn from blind uncomprehending rewriting, sure, but when you already know the field, writing gives you the space to comprehend and digest. Certainly more than copying and pasting or blind acceptance of generated code. It doesn't have to be fun to be better.

> you don't learn from it.

I strongly disagree. I used this strategy for learning how to reverse engineer and hook functions in a game with C++ and learned a ton.

I also used this strategy to learn Imgui and it worked great. Before LLMs I did this when learning from books too.

You have implicit assumption that the person rewriting does nothing else. Understanding intention and solution is in there too for most people.

A lot of calculus is rewriting blocks of solutions and applying them to problems. There is a huge chasm between how calculus and real analysis are taught. By your logic calculus should be of very low value. Yet somehow it opens a lot of doors for people to learn other things based on it.

I had fun and also learned a lot when I retyped programs from magazines back in the day. I am not sure if it's suitable now but there is certainly some merit to the idea.

How do you build intuition about something you cannot remember?

I think it depends on what type of cognition you want to stimulate. It's probably useful to familiarize yourself with a suite of API calls, or get a big picture view of how an algorithm runs.

Everyone learns differently. Retyping was extremely helpful for me. The key, for me, was to look up what I didn't understand.

Wouldn't it maybe make more sense to try to use Cursor-style auto complete if you are trying to learn a language in this day and age?

Having Codex/Claude write all of it won't really benefit you imho.

I'll note this one down. I was under the impression that yes, retyping helps learning something about a language and architecture, but I found myself forgetting it after a while...

Trying it first sounds slower, but definitely better for cognitive training :)

For fun I typed out code from old old magazines and it taught me quite a few things.

Also essays too and other texts non code from llm or books, it helps.

> Retyping things is inefficient for learning. It's like trying to retype calculus solutions

Says who? You're saying this unequivocally like you have research that supports this.

I used to re-write the notes I took for studying and it was like night and day for how well I did on tests. IT also gave me a chance to tighten the information I was receiving. And it's exactly what's happening here.