This seems to be a somewhat common occurrence. When I was first learning programming with python I wanted multiple balls in a pong-like game, so after some googling I ended up writing something like `globals()["ball" + i]` until someone mentioned that arrays were a thing I could use for that.
It’s a recurring thing because programing at its fundamental level is extremely simple. If you have variables, conditionals and loop/goto you can do anything. It’s pretty easy to learn the basics and get much more empowered than you had any right to be.
Armed with such power, you will build a slow, unreadable and unmaintainable mess, but you don’t know that yet, because it’s all working after all.
But as your lines multiply you begin to misstep on your own code and wonder if there’s a better way to do this. And you then stumble upon data structures, functions, classes, etc.
The self-taught road is always more or less like that.
I believe this is the way. That is why I sometimes think whether programming can be taught by using shell environment at first. Every command is like a program and you can do a lot without loops.
Piping also helps. But maybe piping is not a good way to start, dunno.
Shell (and its odd cousin the .BAT file) is interesting because it’s got such wildly different sets of “easy things” and “complex things” compared to almost any language.
Write some ASCII to a file - one character in Bash, 2-?? lines of annoying boilerplate in every other language
Pick the second item in an array - in Bash, a series of random-looking punctuation I can never recall to even create a true array. In any other language, roughly myArray[1]
So I worry that in some cases the student forced to only learn using shell might be bitter once they learned other languages.
PS: it’s funny you mentioned loops as a “do without” — I’d say bash is pretty okay with that — as long as you’re looping over a list of files ;)
