Comment by an_aparallel

I'm not really sure where i stand on this - as someone in the throws of self teaching programming (C) - and consider myself pretty smart. I've attempted learning on my own several times. Many times since 2016 and have given up on many occasions. CS50x is one of the first pieces of material which has close to what i consider sane pedagogy.

I go back and forth between thinking Python is better for learning because "hey, less typing, less curly braces". Then thinking - great i dont know wtf is happening here - just magic i guess?? (refer XCXD comic).

I have seen this many times in relation to education and quite simply, the way we teach, often "for speed", and "at university" - do not equate to learning anything. Learning how things works for real - takes time, and is often outside the scope of a "semester"...and quite honestly beyond our current paradigms of cordoned off disciplines.

Programming/algorithmic thinking is more or less hardware accelerated mathematics. When i opened up Hammack's - How to Prove it - and read about sets, saw the notation - AHA moment. Similar things happened when looking at Charles Petzold's Code and seeing details of carry bits in counter chips, and comparing those to literal carry pins in gear based mechanical calculators (in Norman Bigg's "Quite Right").

None of this comes naturally (to me) - and i think many of the learning resources are there - but are not there at the time you need them. Common comments "just do a project"..."get out of tutorial hell"...very well meaning...but even a 1000 LOC text editor is an absolute head fuck for someone who just learnt to print a triangle of hashes.

I've reached out to the creator of the Turing Complete PC game on Steam. I'm certain once virtualising a computer which runs C in that game - will we reach the epitome of programming pedagogy :-)