Yes, my point is that even though numpy provides a "black box" set of functions, using them is so unnatural (at least for me) that I was forced to completely un

Yes, my point is that even though numpy provides a "black box" set of functions, using them is so unnatural (at least for me) that I was forced to completely understand what the numpy functions were doing internally to have any hope of using them. In fact, now that I think about it, the first assignment asked us to write a 2-loops-in-python version of some function (batch linear classifier, I think), then a 1-loop version, then a 0-loop version, and I often repeated this procedure on subsequent harder questions. That was an useful thing I wasn't expecting to learn from the course - how to vectorize code for numpy (including using strange features like broadcast and reshape)