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> I think telling someone not to worry about the details of how something works because you'll get back to it later is way better than showing them the wrong th

> I think telling someone not to worry about the details of how something works because you'll get back to it later is way better than showing them the wrong thing and then correcting it. One is a promise kept, the other a promise broken. I'm not sure I'd say teaching someone to do something by hand for which they could use an existing function is "wrong". There's huge pedagogical value in knowing how powerful tools you didn't make work. Going bottom-up is a very effective way to do that (just ask the lisp folks), and a culmination of "nice job, you've implemented something so useful that it mirrors what the language designers/library authors did as well, here's how to use their version to save time in the future" is far from a broken promise.

travisjungroth 6y ago
> I'm not sure I'd say teaching someone to do something by hand for which they could use an existing function is "wrong". I didn't say it was wrong the wrong way to teach. I said the code was wrong. Like, if I removed myself from teaching and I just saw that in a PR, I'd definitely suggest they use enumerate instead. I'm a huge fan of reimplementing built in functions as a way to learn. I'm learning Clojure right now (like I stopped to write this comment) and I do it all the time. But, I know I'm doing it. The other thing that's fine is building up to the abstraction. "Let's get the index, now the item. Okay, there's a better way to do this". But you have to do it immediately. I'm just not a fan of showing someone something, letting it sink in, and then having to go back and correct it. And while I hope my arguments stand on their own, and I certainly could be wrong, I'm at least not speaking out of complete inexperience. I've spent a decent amount of time teaching people to code, juggle, work at rope courses, and fly airplanes.
- alexmojaki 6y ago
  Do you get reply notifications?
  - travisjungroth 6y ago
    No, I just check my comments.

travisjungroth 6y ago

> I'm not sure I'd say teaching someone to do something by hand for which they could use an existing function is "wrong". I didn't say it was wrong the wrong way to teach. I said the code was wrong. Like, if I removed myself from teaching and I just saw that in a PR, I'd definitely suggest they use enumerate instead. I'm a huge fan of reimplementing built in functions as a way to learn. I'm learning Clojure right now (like I stopped to write this comment) and I do it all the time. But, I know I'm doing it. The other thing that's fine is building up to the abstraction. "Let's get the index, now the item. Okay, there's a better way to do this". But you have to do it immediately. I'm just not a fan of showing someone something, letting it sink in, and then having to go back and correct it. And while I hope my arguments stand on their own, and I certainly could be wrong, I'm at least not speaking out of complete inexperience. I've spent a decent amount of time teaching people to code, juggle, work at rope courses, and fly airplanes.

alexmojaki 6y ago
Do you get reply notifications?
- travisjungroth 6y ago
  No, I just check my comments.