absolute beginner? Start at https://www.hedycode.com/

Which will ultimately lead into vanilla Python. This is the creator explaining why Hedy is uniquely designed for learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmF7HpU_-9k

I’ve never seen these “express code/tests in natural language” ever work well. Your non-coders need lawyer-like skills to wield English very precisely, or it falls to coders that would be better off using code directly.

problems only have one answer and often one strategy to get to the answer

Totally disagree

You’re thinking of equations, which only have one answer. There are often many possible ways to solve and tackle problems.

If you’ll permit an analogy, even though there’s “only one way” to use a hammer and nail, the overall problem of joining wood can be solved in a variety of ways.

IMO mathematical/logical/abstract thinking is critical for programming well, but IMO that’s different from “math degree” math.

Software as a means to an end can be used in almost every domain, so proficiency within that applicable domain is often either useful or necessary. That is to say, “math degree” math is likely needed for 3d rendering (certain games), scientific computation (incl machine learning), etc, but maybe not, otherwise. It depends on what software you’re trying to build.

To be more specific, general programming is definitely and specifically different from trig and calc. However, because math is also broad, “mathy” concepts like type theory, relational algebra, set theory are considered important for programming, even if only informally or indirectly so.

It’s the difference between knowing you’ll grow and graduate together with your classmates vs knowing you’re only going to see them for that one month before you move away.

I don’t understand, if you’ve got easy to delete copy-pasted code, then delete it. It’ll be a nice and cathartic exercise.

But sounds like what you’re really talking about is code that isn’t easy to delete.

Distributing power across a group of communities over the same topic (e.g. like seats in a congress/parliament) is a nice thought.

However, my second thought was how vulnerable that is in a fediverse. To continue the analogy, an adversary could create new states (server/communities) of arbitrary population (accounts) at will.

Whiskey

IMO folding to hide is about equivalent to moving all contents to another file/private function:

def bad_function(args):
    return _hide_elsewhere(args)

i.e. does nothing. Real solution to pyramids of doom is to fix the code.

That’s changing the goal posts to “not static”

Sounds easy to simplify:

Use one of: constructor A(d), function a(d), or method d.a() to construct A’s.

B and C never change, so I invoke YAGNI and hardcode them in this one and only place, abstracting them away entirely.

No factories, no dependency injection frameworks.

IMO factory functions are totally fine – I hesitate to even give them a special name b/c functions that can return an object are not special.

However I think good use cases for Factory classes (and long-lived stateful instances of) are scarce, often being better served using other constructs.

Dedicated incremental static type checkers for dynamic languages already exist. In particular, Pyright for Python is fantastic and in many ways surpasses the type systems of classic typed languages

But would you pay for it?

My employer’s paying for my access, and I only find it a bit useful here and there

Maybe my company gets a great discount or something, but if they would pay me the subscription cost to give up Copilot, I wouldn’t miss it

I think your ideas are too non-practical/specialized/advanced/low-level for your stated goal of 'digital literacy". They read more like college intro/followup course material and are too esoteric to be readily absorbed, esp by generic teenagers, even if they’ve self-selected to be “lightly interested”.

wanted to add something to the end of a for-loop, but had too little indentation

To address this, I prefer reducing length & depth of nested code, so the for/while is rarely ever not visible along with everything inside it. Others have success with editors that draw indentation lines.

opening up new/anonymous scopes

I occasionally use Python nested functions for this purpose

I find it’s possible to operate Python as a statically typed language if you wanted, though it takes some setup with external tooling. It wasn’t hard, but had to set up pyright, editor integration, configuration to type check strictly and along with tests, and CI.

I even find the type system to be far more powerful than how I remembered Java’s to be (though I’m not familiar with the newest Java versions).

I prefer that, though (it’s in my calendar, but I don’t have to accept). I really can’t stand Outlook’s email-based calendar workflow.

That’s only because the former already implies much of the latter, so they don’t need to repeat it