Had a chat with a CS professor who made me question my whole approach to learning code

Ran into my old college professor at a coffee shop last week. Told him I've been jumping between tutorials for months - Python, then JavaScript, then back to Python. He just looked at me and said "you're learning syntax, not programming." Then he said I should pick one language and build something broken on purpose, then fix it. Said that's how you actually learn. Been trying his method for 5 days now. Has anyone else tried learning by breaking things on purpose?

2 comments

2 Comments

sagey696h ago

real talk, that professor gets it. I learned more from debugging a broken calculator app at 2am than from any "perfect" tutorial project. half the time the bug was just me being stupid but that's how you actually start seeing patterns in the code instead of just the words.

gonzalez.anna5h ago

And that's basically how life works too, you gotta break things to really understand them.