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That doesn't sound silly at all. In fact what sounds silly is taking techniques designed for large professional software projects and applying them to things that aren't anything of the sort. It reminds me of the problem with teaching Java as a first language – you must start with `public class Foo` in a file called `Foo.java`, containing a method declared as `public static void main(String[] args)`, which means you…
You're 100% right across the board. The tension between 'real job skills' and 'things that are good for the sake of learning' are very difficult to balance in a program where an overwhelming majority of students are looking for jobs immediately after the program. This was something I thought about every single day.
Re: Why and How Educators Use GitHub
#21Yeah, it makes me feel like a curmudgeon, or like a job-protectionist, but I think it's a shame that so much of the "learn to code" movement is focused on training for professional software jobs, rather than on learning how programming works so that it can be used as a base tool, more akin to writing or arithmetic. Teaching all these professional techniques up front seems to me like training people for statistics or accounting jobs before they've taken middle school math.