This is a common problem in programming books and tutorials, from what I've seen. They all seem to adhere to a false dichotomy, as if there is no choice other

This is a common problem in programming books and tutorials, from what I've seen. They all seem to adhere to a false dichotomy, as if there is no choice other than "small steps but no reward for a long time" or "big, huge steps, each with a payoff". This is one of the reasons I believe that more focus on Unix-like command line development early on, with real-world usable functionality as the goal of such development, should be more of a part of general-purpose programming language tutorials. Learning the "right" way to include command line option handling, and learning how to build filter utilities, should be near the beginning of every major tutorial. These skills provide the student with the basis of a lot of novice-level exploratory programming that would be of real, practical use to the larval programmer.