Unpopular opinion:

Coding on paper exams actually do help at beginner stages of learning to code.
It makes you at least think how to write things simply, without overthinking the problem, makes you familiar with semicolons (so all you stupid fks wont complain that it has taken you 2 hours to find missing semicolon (actually, who has ever encountered that problem, besides memes?)), makes you learn the syntax, just many benefits that spoiled OOP/FP starting kids cant see, because they relied on autocomplete so much.
God, I hate people who are trying to render things stupid just because they can't see the fking point -.-'
Losing my mind about who goes into "programming" and who calls himself "developer" is just fueled by that.

@halfflat well I'm not against using long names, if you have tools for that - go for it, use them. But if you have a problem with writing simple FizzBuzz or even simple sorting on paper, then why the fuck are you considering yourself a programmer? :v

Working problems out on paper is always nice and you're right about it being very good for basics. What gets people irritated is when they're made to inhale large API based stuff and vomit it out on paper, especially in a language like Java which is full of huge names. For eg, we had to make Java swing stuff on paper, a different batch had to write android app code on paper. That's utterly pointless.

@RememberMe well Java is not suited well for paper exams, but I get your point, and sure - it is pointless.
The same goes for maths classes where you are supposed to take a calculus exam without a single page with formulas etc. It will take me fucking 2 minutes to google that, so why should I remember how to deal with integrals ffs... (yeah, I have an exam coming and frustrated af about that)

@halfflat m8, I am helping people that are about to get a BSc and they can't even google how to write file input in Java. Or don't get what private means. Or can't even take a screenshot and use their phones to take a photo. And those fuckers have balls to say "can you write it simpler" when I'm trying to do it as easy as I can and comment the shit out of that, so their tiny minds can grasp the concept.
I know I'm harsh but man, I'm just fed up :v

@Xirate oh lol, good luck (though I would argue that it's important to keep math formulas in your head, but whatever).

Another annoying thing about paper coding - it's an absolute bitch to check, lol. I was part of a technical group in college and we held a lot of interviews, a part of that process involved people writing a short exam that involved coding basic problems on paper. Man was it such a pain to check and mark that stuff properly.

But again, I agree with the fundamental point here.

Disagreeing here.
Coding Exams should be on a computer and you should be allowed to google. This is what programming is about in the end. Beeing efficient at searching and solving issues.
If you have a paper exam then it should be more on the theoretical side and pseudocode. We had to 'code' 5 java classes with getters and setters by hand in college. I learned fuck all doing it.

Maybe its just the way I think. But I tend to go back and forth while writting code a lot. Example would be "I need to do this, call this.. but since Im calling this Im gonna validate it first, but this validation also relies on me calling this afterwards, which means I need to initialize that ..."

You can do that on paper and I always end up with tons of arrows and small text squished into places

And secondly, I hated in school the prof. Making a big thing about not knowing a name of a function he literally made up for his own shitty library he forces you to use. Bitch, if you let me use a computer Id seenin InteliSense that your functions is written *slightly* differently than what I remembered... Are you teaching me programming, or memorizing your stupid shit?!

Paper programming pisses me off cause everyone is suddenly a smartass if you make a mistake. Im ok with it if Im allowed to use pseudocode code. First problem remains and its weird, but at least I get to solve a problem

Coding on paper is a bit extreme (and really just freaking dumb), I find that coding only with the terminal (with no dotfiles) is best.
You still get vim, man, your compiler, but no Google and no fancy coding tool or anything like that.
(It's how my school exams work, I'm at 42)