Should students ever write code then? Most of it's not going to be production quality, so it seems like you think that would be a waste of their time. My exper

Should students ever write code then? Most of it's not going to be production quality, so it seems like you think that would be a waste of their time. My experience over and over in life is that I read about something complex, think I understand it, go try to do it, eg, writing a proof or code or teaching it to someone else, and discover that there were some aspects of the thing that I didn't fully understand or had a misconception about. That observation that even very smart people are good at convincing themselves they understand something better than they actually do is basically why the Feynman Technique works so well. I tend to just like to write toy programs and simulations to check my understanding. The resulting prose or program isn't the point, it's all the points you hit in the process where you realize you're missing something. I write small prototypes pretty much every day, learn from them, throw them away, then apply what I learned on the real problem I'm working on. I find that to be an incredibly fruitful approach. I coded up a toy RSA implementation after we had a lecture about RSA in my Number Theory class. And I didn't say that it didn't work; it just obviously didn't perform very well because that wasn't the point (I was very new to programming and working in JS as that was the only environment available to me). I'm sorry I can't pinpoint the exact details of what I learned about RSA a quarter century ago. When I took a Cryptography class a couple years later taught by Michael Rabin, I did very well and felt like I had a better grasp of some of the basic ideas than I would've if I hadn't spent some time working through some basic implementations.