That Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does

I’ve had some fun with a line from the movie The Princess Bride and meme generator below inspired by working with students.

Programming is so non intuitive for many students. An equals sign doesn’t mean what they are used to and then we confuse it in some languages by having “=” and “==” mean different things. And that is just the start of the problem.

I find myself asking students “what do you think that code does?” in order to understand exactly what problem they are trying to solve.