Agreed. I also like calculus as an example. First you gotta write out derivatives by hand, then you learn you can “drop the exponent then subtract one from it.”

Agreed. I also like calculus as an example. First you gotta write out derivatives by hand, then you learn you can “drop the exponent then subtract one from it.” Doing it the long way without the shortcuts helps you understand it better inside and out I’d think for when you do use existing code. I find sometimes it’s fun to write out a program to do something without any (or at least very minimum) imports just to see how I’d solve it (for a reasonably real use case). Helps to better understand the concepts / tricks the “real” implementation might use. Some fun examples: building an animated UI spinner “by hand” or setting up a sub-pub implementation for passing data around my app.