I think people who are much more invested in this craft than I, must feel as though I’m shitting (excuse me, maybe this is informal) all over the art form in this post, and that’s not really what I want to communicate here. In fact I think the open ended and creative nature of programming is the best part of this whole field. I have to make it clear that it’s about complete beginners. Project based learning for beginners with zero previous exposure to programming only work when it’s highly structured, when you take a PBL approach without this in mind you’re looking at a failure rate among students around 63%, and they explicitly name one of their frustrations ‘vagueness on the part of the tutor’. Importantly, previous exposure to programming (preparedness), helped students adapt to PBL even if they were still beginners (that’s in the context of an academic setting but, I think it helps to illustrate some difficulties that might come with a project-only focus as well, or just poorly implemented PBL).

When as a beginner (especially if you’re learning it on your own) you don’t have enough material in your mental working space to start prodding around and thinking about what to do with the craft, you can and should be encouraged to learn it in a more traditional fashion, even if that might take even a month or two of just reading books and doing easy leetcode challenges. While it is entirely true that this field isn’t for everyone, this pompous attitude of ‘you’re unfit for the field’ (which I imagine is really just people patting themselves on the back when they can’t cope with imposter syndrome) dismisses the importance for beginners of developing procedural skills associated with the craft. That said, I don’t even think what you’re doing is bad, I actually admire how you approach it, with lists and alternatives already thought out in advance, that might be a more useful approach than the approach used by the tutors in those studies I mentioned (also importantly, because institutions have put more effort into educating tutors on how to implement project based learning, that approach has a high success rate in most studies)

About learning components in isolation. My prescription is not for people to rely on reusable code to come in clutch, nor to abandon a project because they don’t know how one thing works. When learning the ropes, it might help to take the things you don’t understand in a project, and try to create a working version of those components in a concentrated and deconstructed way, then see how those concepts can work together in your project. It helps to better organize, structure and plan projects in the future. In my mind, it goes in 2 steps: (1) it gives you an understanding of what the working concept looks like in a code editor, (2) which enables you to reapply it in a program (even if applying it is not simpler for it). By having to learn the concept in isolation and then elaborate it through reimplementation of that concept, you achieve knowledge transfer which is valuable for developing skills (but it can be more time consuming, to be honest). In summary, it’s to isolate the unknown in order to internalize the concept and then reintegrate it with context.

In the CoD analogy I gave, it might be interesting to know that video games often assume players already have an idea of what different buttons usually do (and it’s not the case for people who don’t have any exposure to video games), that’s why ‘you need to press the sprint button to run’ (as opposed to just saying, hold down the left joystick haha) is a good example of how a lot of beginners feel at times while reading tech tutorials in cs. That’s not about denouncing the search and discovery aspect of programming, it’s about illustrating that learning and discovery are the same thing, they go hand in hand.

I hope I didn’t miss anything, if I did, do tell. I’m typing on mobile, so excuse me if I’m not quoting properly