[jsnk]

I agree that learning the nuances of languages is important, but to demand this aspect of learning to someone who is just beginning to code is actually harmful in my opinion.

As students of computer science, we have strong tendency to learn things bottom-up. We take care in learning the fundamentals before applying theories in real work. This is not a bad thing. Better quality codes are shipped and become more maintanable.

But for someone who is just starting out, the bottom-up approach becomes an insurmountable obstacle. As a result, many give up too soon and never end up enjoying the joy of creating real working applications.

Look back to when we first started to code. I wrote some bad BASIC code in high school abusing GOTO and GOSUB everywhere I could. I knew nothing about programming language paradigms or memeory management, but I had a lot of fun coding without reading any book on CS.