Not an answer but a personal anecdote. PC Magazine used to publish the 8086 assembly language source to many utilities, often TSRs, and I definitely learned from them. I once typed in a Pascal program for a card game and learned from that. But the question mentions BASIC and I never had anything to do with that language and its variants. I also remember seeing various data blocks that were 6502 assembly code or similar, but without explanation, so it would be difficult to learn from them.

No, the BASIC is only part of an example. Every language counts. There is also a tag for assembly, but only 5 tags can be set. 3 tags are occupied by something else, so only two tags were free. Therefore I used the in my opinion two most important languages of this time for home computers as additional tags. And that was usually BASIC and Assembly. But the question itself is not limited to BASIC or Assembly. Anyway, thanks for sharing your personal experience.

Yeah you can definitely learn something from it, but not necessarily by typing it in and actually run it. It's more or less like reading a mathematical proof such that you read, understand, and reason about it (essentially using the human brain as a static analyzer) and run it as a interpreted language with pen and paper. Last time when I was reading a programming book (in 2019) I did manage to find a few bugs in the code listings by reading the code, and I certainly did not type it in.

You could if you wanted to, or you could just type them in.

I certainly learned some things about Commodore 64 programming in the very early days when listings were all in BASIC.

@Coder I removed the language specific tags as it's just about programms in general, right?

@Raffzahn Okay. No problem.

I'd say typing in the program was different from learning. Stopping to think about program logic would make you lose your place as to what you needed to type in next. It's like if you see someone taking a look at their wristwatch, then you ask them "What time is it?" and they have to look again, because they weren't looking for the time of day, but how much time they had to get to work or whatever.

They certainly taught you a lot about debugging!

The learning happened not so much during the typing as afterwards, when you tried to run the program and it didn't work right and then you had to go in and figure out why. :)

@Raffzahn But couldn't it also be that while typing you unconsciously learn to understand the code? Especially if it is BASIC, BASIC is not very difficult to understand.

Coder Would have said so first, but @ArthurKalliokoski has a point in that not everyone was interested in learning - which is a fundamental prerequisite for success. So I guess it may be safe to say that anyone interested in programming did learn by reading (and typing), but not everyone typing was interested in learning.

@Raffzahn Good argument.

@Coder “could it be that you subconsciously learn?” Think back to the era when businesses employed typing pools. How much did the women who’s job it was to transcribe all day, every day learn? Honestly, they probably learned something about what their employers did, but their primary duty was to type quickly and accurately.

FTR, I definitely learned a lot about coding by typing in those BASIC programs from the days of yore. Often they were written by people who were ahead of me, curve-wise, and I picked up techniques and tricks in real-world examples. Related question: retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/23566/…

At first, I had no idea what a lot of the more complex programs did like games. But then I would start to mess with changing some lines just to see what would happen. Change a POKE, or a FOR loop, or a DATA statement. See what havoc I would cause.

Sometimes whole chunks where the fan fold in the paper was were missed out in the mags. This also happened in Intel's technical handbooks. You only found that out when typing in the code.

This is like asking if painting Mr. Miyage's porch helped Daniel become the Karate Kid.

Don't know if this is worth an answer, but my case no. When I was 9 in France there wasn't a lot of magazines, most of them were dedicated to specific machines. There was no internet and few (no) knowledgeable people to help. I was frustrated to find that the long Amstrad GFA Basic code I typed wouldn't run in Atari ST Omikron. Didn't know the details, it was like a magic formula and before I even started to learn english. So no translation (and considering machine differences, sometimes not possible). At 10 I found the Omikron manual that came with the machine and started to learn by myself..

My Arduinos would be doing absolutely nothing if it wasn't for me butchering other peoples code to fit my own projects. Reading about C is, I have to say, very very boring. But successfully troubleshooting something gives me enough motivation to actually pick up the giant book and try to figure out what is wrong.

My sessions on the card punch taught me to be the programmer I am.

For the record; the timbre of the answers has persuaded me that the question inherently invites opinion-based answers — by posing "Was this just tedious work, or did the user learn something about programming just by typing it in the computer?" amongst others as independent from whether there are any studies on the topic. Have voted accordingly. It'll probably just be me, but there it is.

Pretty much depends: On whether you wanted to learn something. You could, in fact, learn a lot from type-in programs (some even taught you how not to do it). I personally think I learned a lot, not just by typing, but I read a lot of them only, without even bothering to type.