Everyone seems to be missing this bit - it is about those fundamentals first. The end goal is eliminating repetition. But it takes repetition to get to that poi

Everyone seems to be missing this bit - it is about those fundamentals first. The end goal is eliminating repetition. But it takes repetition to get to that point because that's how the human brain works. I observe this with students who use IDEs in the beginning. Some "experienced" developer tells them they need to use an IDE because it "saves time." Then the students tab-complete their way through code and don't really understand, or remember, what it is. The connections, the pathways to memory, aren't as great. And not everyone learns this way. If your first program out of the gate was a program to do math for you, before previously learning anything about programming, then based on my experience you are an outlier, someone with a gift and natural affinity for this field. Bottom line: if this was too repetitive for you, you weren't the target audience.