'What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?'
This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
'What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. [...] And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?'