but because “I didn’t teach it to everyone yet” we couldn’t use loops.
That is aggravating. “I didn’t teach the class the proper way to do this task, so you have to use the tedious way.” What is the logic behind that other than wasting everyone’s time?
Teaching someone the wrong way to do something frequently makes the right way make way more sense. Someone who just copy/pasted 99 near identical if statements understands on a fundamental level when, why, and where you use a for loop much more than someone who just read in the textbook “a for loop is used to iterate elements in a collection”.
Reminds me of a dude that wrote the equivalent of this in Visualg (a brazilian pseudocode language and program, meant solely for teaching programming)
if
if
if
if
if (x < 10) then
print(x)
else
else
else
else
else
That the thing ran and didn’t complain about the amount of loose/needless if’s checking fuck all baffles my mind to this day.