Thanks for reading the post, Paul. Yeah, I was waffling with the Kindergarten thing after I'd written and rewritten a few times. I started out mentioning things we learn in kindergarten but the analogy went away and got replaced by the teenage driver and road rules thing.
Yeah, I know it's probably too much to ask of the average student to start thinking deeply about some of those things. My son is taking a
Java programming course at Ohio State this semester and he has pretty much the same kind of blase attitude about writing code. I could be totally wrong about all that stuff I wrote. Maybe I'm still just a young idealist at heart.
But then again, I know there are young programmers out there who are already thinking about elegance and craftsmanship. For as long as I can remember, back to when I was learning Pascal as one of my first two languages, I already understood the concept of elegance in code. I don't know, maybe I'm just weird that way.
Thanks again for reading the post.