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Not quite that young. I am a teacher with 85 teenagers under my wing, at the last count. An important part of school is learning how to learn. It is a consta
by gorgoiler 6y ago
Not quite that young. I am a teacher with 85 teenagers under my wing, at the last count.
An important part of school is learning how to learn. It is a constant struggle with pupils to get them to actually think instead of googling for an answer.
Sometimes it feels a bit like I am a grumpy oldie telling them things like _in my day we had to look things up in books instead of using Google!_ but most of the time it’s valuable in and of itself to go through things from first principles.
(The sensehat bug was a case in point.)
As far as source code is concerned, it turned out to be quite tractable to follow the Python source code at least far enough to find the timsort.txt document.
If any of these kids go on to have technical careers, there will be plenty enough time for googling answers later on in life. Hopefully some of them will be writing the answers too.
- fnord123 6y agotbh the only source of truth is the code. Documentation and comments are all lies! shakes fist
- toyg 6y agoIt's a bit like tech support, where you have to assume the user is always lying.
- maxbond 6y agoI once got locked out of my Amazon account because I went through a weird flow where I ended up changing my email without clicking a confirmation link, and I made a typo, so it was changed to a nonexistant email. No one in tech support believed me. No one was willing to help me. They told me to make a new account. I've done my best not to buy from Amazon since. Please don't be hostile to users.
- toyg 6y agoThat's more fraud detection than tech-support, sadly. Even if they believed you, they might not have been authorized to help. You wouldn't want random people to hijack your account by crying "typo" to the support guys.
- dragonsngoblins 6y agoSurely they could revert it back to the previous email account though? Possibly after you provide some kind of validation like the last few digits of credit card tied to that account or something?
- toyg 6y agoI'm almost sure Amazon used to allow you to log on with old email-password combinations, until they got flak for it. Not sure what they do now.
- deeringc 6y agoOn the flip side, it seems to me like having all of this friction may lose many folks early on. I absolutely agree that debugging and problem solving are core skills to master and fundamental for any programmer. As is understanding the system from first principles, and how all of the different sub systems interact. But in my opinion they shouldn't necessarily be the first thing someone encounters when they try to do X.