With respect to the formalisms bit: I didn't expect him to understand deeply about those kinds of formalisms. I don't expect most beginning programmers to care,

With respect to the formalisms bit: I didn't expect him to understand deeply about those kinds of formalisms. I don't expect most beginning programmers to care, even. But the conflation of the ideas was apparent in his (faulty) intuition of them, and it impeded comprehension. In order to use a string, you must, at some level, have some sort of understanding that it is data. How your understanding manifests itself is different. The copy/paste/fiddle process can work when you have some sort of understanding what to copy, paste, fiddle, and search for. Developing that understanding so quickly also leads me to doubt.