[del_operator]

Teaching someone to abstract out a name for something they want to do takes lots of practice, but then when they are pushed to have to abstract can lead to decision paralysis around when to do it. Having folks practice this together and feel out the nuances helps a lot. Control flow is also a tricky early concept for any new programming setting, but also, learning to compose is too. For some students tackling control flow and composition early by explicitly composing abstracted funcs feels great. However, I’ve oft seen many of my students want to get granular with control flow for a long while before they abstract or utilize many abstractions, probably because their mental model of what they want to do is stepping through each detail of an example they have in mind. Another component for andragogical learning is to just sell the WHYs of functional patterns: why care, why remember, why it’s helping, why they should just give it 5, why it’s ok to forget, et cetera. Learning and jumping straight into synthesizing, evaluating and analyzing code for a potential production setting has been difficult with a loose understanding. You need good scaffolding in your backlog, lots of time, patience, context sharing, and resourceful experts to turn to check your understanding and promote good tooling/solutions in the ecosystem. I saw this when my team switched to elixir. I saw this when my team stitched to K8s. Lots of delays I’m happy we worked through. Pairing a lot helped through it