> Beginners have to learn -how- to program on top of the language's syntax and toolchain itself, so it helps tremendously to be able to search online when they

> Beginners have to learn -how- to program on top of the language's syntax and toolchain itself, so it helps tremendously to be able to search online when they get stuck. And boy do they get stuck a lot, in my experience. While this is not a crazy argument to make, it applies to people teaching themselves to program. If you're teaching someone else how to program, you're very carefully introducing new ideas, you're teaching them what they need to know, and you're answering the questions when they get stuck. You are referring more to university classes that "teach" programming. That's a little different from this, where the author was actually teaching.