Coding, or any other skill for that matter, is no different.
Back in the early days of computing people wrote software by working it out on paper, encoding it on to punch cards, and then giving that program (deck of cards) to an operator who loaded them and ran the code. If it didn't work properly you would get back a print out of the 'debug' which amounted to a memory dump. You'd then patch your punch cards based on working out where you'd screwed up, and try again.
That was the computer software industry for about a decade before time-sharing, VDUs, etc.
People absolutely did learn to code by reading books and nothing much else. Access to computers was so restricted (because time to use a computer was shared between lots of people) there weren't any other options.
Heck, I learned a lot of early web stuff like TCP, HTML, etc reading books at my parents house when I was at home from uni and didn't have my computer with me, and that was the late 90s. Of course you can learn coding by studying the theory without practicing. It's just a lot less fun.
That is actively engaging your brain, just at a very slow pace with a very slow feedback loop.
Dijksta's "I had everything worked out before I wrote the code, because the computer didn't exist yet" is the same. It's like working mathematics out: that's not "just reading", it's actively engaging. Actively writing. Completely different from the passive consumption of AI output.
> Of course you can learn coding by studying the theory without practising. It's just a lot less fun.
No you can't. When you first started an editor or IDE you wrote some vague code-shaped junk that probably wasn't even syntactically correct, and didn't learn programming until you practised. Of course you need to learn some some theory from a book or instructor, but that's not the same as actually learning something.
Yep Knuth learned by reading an IBM manual with source code while sitting on a beach during summer vacation. Decades later systems hackers learned by reading illicit copies of Lions' Commentary on Unix w/Source
Back in the early days of computing people wrote software by working it out on paper, encoding it on to punch cards, and then giving that program (deck of cards) to an operator who loaded them and ran the code. If it didn't work properly you would get back a print out of the 'debug' which amounted to a memory dump. You'd then patch your punch cards based on working out where you'd screwed up, and try again.
That was the computer software industry for about a decade before time-sharing, VDUs, etc.
People absolutely did learn to code by reading books and nothing much else. Access to computers was so restricted (because time to use a computer was shared between lots of people) there weren't any other options.
Heck, I learned a lot of early web stuff like TCP, HTML, etc reading books at my parents house when I was at home from uni and didn't have my computer with me, and that was the late 90s. Of course you can learn coding by studying the theory without practicing. It's just a lot less fun.