His response:
I think there is this miss perception that maybe this is sort of the way school has traditionally been done, that students think that there is one correct answer and you’re measured by how close you come to the teacher’s answer. This is not the way things work it all. What I’m trying to get you to do is to grapple with the problem, come up with a solution and then analyze alternatives for how it might be doe differently. So, if you have the problem and you come up with a solution and it solves the problem, then you’ve got it. That’s a 100 percent correct. Pack yourself on the back. Don’t worry about how anybody else solved it. You did the job ! And I know you can do it. You got all the backgrounds you need, full stop.
Now after you’ve done it, now it’s time to inter expect a little bit and I talk about the way I did it and my way of doing it might be different than yours and if you think my way is interesting and has something novel that show you didn’t think of it before, then you can say haaa. Maybe next time all do it that way. But that doesn’t take away from you solution. Your solution is still fine, but now you’ve learned a new trick. You know a new tool that you can add to your arsenal that maybe next time you can use.
And I let you know on a secret. Every advanced feature that is in a programming language is there because somebody suffered in the past. Somebody tried to write it on the long way and it took a really long time and they said Jesus, gotta be better way and then we put the better way into the language.
You gotta understand why this is in the language. Now if I just told you a head of times, here’s a new feature, this is part of the language, you wouldn’t get it to the degree you would if you see why it’s there because you suffered without it.
And I know it might be different to what you used to before, where you were spoon fed everything you need to know a head of time and maybe that’s how school works in some cases, but not how the real world works.
So don’t get frustrated. If you have a solution that works, no matter how you did it, that’s fine, that’s perfect, that’s a 100 percent solution and then, after that, you can start learning about the alternative ways to do it.
