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Comment by bphogan | Hacker News Reader

Just putting this out there - as a teacher, I have seen the importance of repetition. My students would benefit from the repetition at the end of this.

Whether they know they'd benefit or not.

Like scales on a piano.

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The very reason that I became interested in programming is the ability to eliminate repetition. Instead of solving math problems, I could make a calculator program. Instead of typing something out many times, the computer would do it for me. Type once, run forever. That was an amazing revalation.

If I had learned programming through mindless repetition, through typing the same thing over and over again (As codecademy has students doing here), I would have quit early on.

Instead, I learned through solving problems. Diverse problems forced me to apply my newfound bits and pieces of knowledge in different ways. I always focused on eliminating repetition whenever I could. I had no interest in typing a lot.

There are different kinds of repetition. Practicing the elimination of repetition is the best repetition there is.

Finally, of all the computer-related tools out there, the command line is perhaps the best at aiding users in the elimination of repetition. With the ease of adding new commands, with programs like vi and cron at one's fingertips, there is so much even a beginning user can do to start eliminating his/her repetition. So to TEACH this tool as one of mindless typing is utterly abominable.

Everyone seems to be missing this bit - it is about those fundamentals first. The end goal is eliminating repetition. But it takes repetition to get to that point because that's how the human brain works.

I observe this with students who use IDEs in the beginning. Some "experienced" developer tells them they need to use an IDE because it "saves time."

Then the students tab-complete their way through code and don't really understand, or remember, what it is. The connections, the pathways to memory, aren't as great.

And not everyone learns this way. If your first program out of the gate was a program to do math for you, before previously learning anything about programming, then based on my experience you are an outlier, someone with a gift and natural affinity for this field.

Bottom line: if this was too repetitive for you, you weren't the target audience.

I'd say eliminating repetition is meta-programming, rather than programming. It is one of the things that set experienced programmers apart from beginners.

I believe in good repetition. But what is good repetition? Nano on a dot file 5 times? For the command line it should involve commands that will save people time. Teach them: 1. how to use find and grep, and other commonly used commands. 2. introducing them to vi and explaining why people use it (instead of nano) 3. user configuration with a brief on the FS structure (what is in etc, usr, opt, etc...) 4. lastly, but most importantly, how powerful and dangerous the unix command line is. Why you should learn shell scripting. And getting started with shell scripting.

To me, that list would go from beginner to intermediate++

Sorry, but your second item, using vi has nothing really to do with learning the command line. You just prefer vi as editor and didn't like them choosing nano. Quite a few don't use Vi but use the command line. Don't turn this into a discussion about why Vi is the better editor.

You do it as many times as it takes to become muscle memory. That's a lot of times for some people.

I suspect many on this thread have forgotten what it was like the first time they did command line stuff. I teach this stuff in a classroom setting twice a yeaer.

This repetition is sorely needed.

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