> Except that we need to learn how to use the tools thst exist instead if > implementing our own. You shouldn't need programing ability for something > like this
Every programming assignment you'll receive has already been written many times over before. The point isn't to create something novel. When you learned to solve quadratic equations with the quadratic formula, you weren't breaking new mathematical ground. But you had to study it and apply it by hand; if you just used Matlab, a programmable calculator, or any other pre-made tool and showed the result to your teacher, you would have failed, and rightly so because you demonstrated no evidence that you gained any conceptual understanding, which is the whole point of school. So something like 'paste' has been written a million times before...that's not the point. The point was that *you* were supposed to implement it for your own learning experience or just plain practice, even if it is trivial and stupid; in that case you write it in 5 minutes and move on with your life. But instead, you effectively just turned in someone else's code. If it were a job, yeah, that would be the correct solution, without a doubt. If your aim is to go into IT and focus on using pre-made tools for everything, great, I guess I can't argue. But if you're going into computer science, I don't see the harm in doing a pointless little programming exercise any more than spending time to study standard mathematical procedures.
