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so why do people learn this way? i am an old fogey. i wrote my first program on a piece of paper after watching my fiend use his zx spectrum. i didn't do exe

so why do people learn this way? i am an old fogey. i wrote my first program on a piece of paper after watching my fiend use his zx spectrum. i didn't do exercises - i knew i could make this awesome spinning prism (dude! a spinning prism!) and so i just bugged the hell out of my friend until i found out what commands did what. isn't it obvious that you should start by building something fun? what's so wrong with people that they think they need to do exercises first? what is wrong with culture when programming is a "task" that requires "exercises" rather than something awesome you're going to make happen? are these people that are being made to program (when they don't want to)? do they have no imagination? are they scared? why are they spending their lives doing exercises rather than things they want to do? don't they know they will die?

astrofinch 14y ago
"i just bugged the hell out of my friend until i found out what commands did what." That works great when you have a friend to bug. And nowadays, you can Google for solutions, so this kind of "I'll learn it when I need it" strategy works reasonably well. But what doesn't work is when you have no friend to bug, and you don't have enough knowledge even to know what Google keywords you should be using. That's the point at which you really want to spend time acquiring fundamental concepts without regard for how useful they'll be in the near term. Let's say someone was trying to learn physics, and they didn't yet know algebra. Which strategy do you think would work better: making a dedicated effort to learn algebra first, or diving in to physics and only learning algebra as they needed it?