Comment by euske

I teach CS to freshmen. The author keeps telling something is "a wrong question", but I feel that he is tackling a wrong problem. The problems shown here are rather syntactic/superficial - it's mostly a matter of language/tool proficiency. The real problem I commonly see among students is to systematically verbalize a thought that you're initially unaware of - e.g. take the binary search for example. The idea can be easily understood, but realizing that a range can be expressed with two numbers (high & low) is hard. Another example is to enumerate all permutations of given items. It's easy to imagine what are the expected result for a certain input, but it's not easy to describe the systematic process - it'd require some mental leap. These are what many people are struggling with, and something we still don't know how to teach.