Re:Show HN: Python library for learning binarytrees
by foo101 on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @12:03PM
(#17248229)
> I couldn't for the life of me figure out why my sift wasn't working. Wasted like an hour on it. Turns out it was working, it was just my printing/test-harness stuff that was flawed. Sure that was a useful hard-knock, but it really served as a distraction from what I was trying to do at the moment.
What you think is an unnecessary distraction is in my opinion a very important experience and part of the learning process. Everything you hand-code for your own data structure be it pretty-print, test-harness, etc. are all important while learning.
> Having a helper class that solves some of the basics well and sets you up for success lets you focus on the larger problems without having to constantly re-visit the basics.
Once you have built the data structures bottom-up from scratch along with all the additional utilities to pretty-print it, test it, etc. you have your helpers ready already. There is no need to use someone else's helpers at that point.
What you think is an unnecessary distraction is in my opinion a very important experience and part of the learning process. Everything you hand-code for your own data structure be it pretty-print, test-harness, etc. are all important while learning.
> Having a helper class that solves some of the basics well and sets you up for success lets you focus on the larger problems without having to constantly re-visit the basics.
Once you have built the data structures bottom-up from scratch along with all the additional utilities to pretty-print it, test it, etc. you have your helpers ready already. There is no need to use someone else's helpers at that point.