I consider myself a fairly good developer, and I think that's in large part due to knowing, "doing this should be possible, and the reason it's not working right now is just due to stupidity (my own or the developer of whatever I'm using's)". But yes, in a few (thankfully rare) cases it just plain isn't practically possible. Even then, I've given up on problems just to have it nagging in the back of my mind and then randomly coming up with a beautifully simple solution weeks later. That's sort of the essence of what I like about programming (and math too).

Needs qualification. Research shows trial and error learning is very durable, but it’s not the most time efficient (in fact it’s relatively poor, usually, on that front). The two concepts are a bit different. Yes, trial and error engages more of the brain and provides a degree of difficulty that can sometimes be helpful in making the concepts sticky, but well designed teaching coupled with meaningful and appropriately difficult retrieval and practice is better on most axes. When possible… good teaching often needs refinement. And you’d be surprised how many educators know very little about the neuroscience of learning!

Trial and error was the root of what became my IT career. I became curious about what each executable did from DOS and with that did my first tweaking of autoexec.bat and config.sys to maximise memory. Years later I was the only one who could investigate network (and some other) problems in Windows via the command line while I was the junior of the team. Ended up being the driver of several new ways of working for the department and company.

There’s a pretty rich literature around this style of pedagogy going back for decades and it is certainly not a new idea. My preferred formulation is Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” [1], which is the set of activities that a student can do with assistance from a teacher but not on their own. Keeping a student in the ZPD is pretty easy in a one-on-one setting, and can be done informally, but it is much harder when teaching a group of students (like a class). The. Latter requires a lot more planning, and often leans on tricks like “scaffolded” assignments that let the more advanced students zoom ahead while still providing support to students with a more rudimentary understanding.

Direct instruction sounds similar but in my reading I think the emphasis is more on small, clearly defined tasks. Clarity is always good, but I am not sure that I agree that smallness is. There are times, particularly when students are confused, that little steps are important. But it is also easy for students to lose sight of the goals when they are asked to do countless little steps. I largely tuned out during my elementary school years because class seemed to be entirely about pointless minutiae.

By contrast, project work is often highly motivational for students, especially when projects align with student interests. A good project keeps a student directly in their ZPD, because when they need your help, they ask. Lessons that normally need a lot of motivation to keep students interested just arise naturally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development

I’m curious: what do you see as unnecessary about the CLI? Or, to put it another way, in what way should the CLI be changed so that the only remaining difficulties are the necessary ones?

Yea, and I think it is amazing, but in the same time it will work for some and not for others

The same way scratch works for some, redstone for others, and https://strudel.cc/ for third

I think the truth is that we are more different than alike, and computers are quite strange.

I personally was professionally coding, and writing hundreds of lines of code per day for years, and now I look at this code and I can see that I was not just bad, I literally did not know what programming is.

Human code is an expression of the mind that thinks it. Some language allow us to better see into the author's mind, e.g forth and lisp, leak the most, c also leaks quite a lot e.g. reading antirez's code or https://justine.lol/lambda/, or phk or even k&r, go leaks the least I think.

Anyway, my point is, programming is quite personal, and many people have to find their own way.

PS: what I call programming is very distant from "professional software development"

there are 45 million devs in the world (out of which probably 10 can actually program) and 8.5 billion people

we could say 0.5%?

well, technically 2, my second was "good, now do it better"

I’d been thinking more just typing the commands into a terminal window on the big screen, but something like this could be really helpful for seeing the intermediate steps.

woah that looks nice!