My dad trained programmers at IBM—this was way before any such thing as a CS degree—and he said when they switched from coding templates and once-per-day assembly runs to writing code in a terminal environment, his students consistently failed to complete their assignments.
My experience was the opposite. When my stack of cards had one trivial typo in it so failed to run, and I had to wait 1 or more days for a rerun, it was not helpful. In a terminal environment, I fixed it quickly and moved on, launching a decades-long software career.
I can empathise with a collection of programming students, used to a particular method of working, finding adjusting to a new method of working difficult. I found the transition from compiled C++ to interpreted python tricky and only really “got it” once I found new techniques to help me (eg TDD)
He was extremely critical of what he called “trial-and-error programming.”
But, per my other comment, being able to fix things and rerun quickly isn't necessarily "trial and error programming". Even when it was, we LEARNED from those errors, didn't repeat them, and progressed to writing solid code. Getting to that point far faster than with the ancient turnaround times.
Hey I’m just relating the observations of a cranky geezer. One certainly couldn’t operate under that kind of structure in this day and age. Those guys had like 16kbits for the whole operating system.
Totally agree. And no disrespect to my predecessors - they were giants.