I don't know if we can conflate these two things. Scales build muscle memory, so you can add the creativity without thinking about the mechanics later. It also builds endurance and awareness of how to manage your body's efforts, like an athlete training. Programming isn't about doing the same thing over and over, but about developing insights and new knowledge. Can you get better at writing the same, or similar programs over and over again, absolutely. Is that what we do? Not so much. If they're similar we copy and paste, or we find that we'll do the same thing more than a few times and write tools to help.
Maybe a direct comparison to scales is a math test with 100 problems in the same space. Is that effective at helping you learn a basic math op better? Or once you have the concept after the first 10, does it bore you and you tune out?
It's not exactly the same and your point about new insights and knowledge is well taken.
It's why doing different leetcode problems is better than repeating problems you've already done.
However, doing leetcode activates and reinforce neural pathways involving emulating a program and debugging, so that seems pretty useful to me. It has secondary benefits of lowering error rates and improving language knowledge.
I don't know if we can conflate these two things. Scales build muscle memory, so you can add the creativity without thinking about the mechanics later. It also builds endurance and awareness of how to manage your body's efforts, like an athlete training. Programming isn't about doing the same thing over and over, but about developing insights and new knowledge. Can you get better at writing the same, or similar programs over and over again, absolutely. Is that what we do? Not so much. If they're similar we copy and paste, or we find that we'll do the same thing more than a few times and write tools to help.
Maybe a direct comparison to scales is a math test with 100 problems in the same space. Is that effective at helping you learn a basic math op better? Or once you have the concept after the first 10, does it bore you and you tune out?
It's not exactly the same and your point about new insights and knowledge is well taken.
It's why doing different leetcode problems is better than repeating problems you've already done.
However, doing leetcode activates and reinforce neural pathways involving emulating a program and debugging, so that seems pretty useful to me. It has secondary benefits of lowering error rates and improving language knowledge.