Learning to code is a prerequisite for learning computer science. You will not ever get interested in how to sort numbers in an efficient way until you've had to try to do it yourself because you needed it in some of your own projects. This practical need of yours will put everything else into a context and things will flow from there.
For example, I think I "invented" selection sort when I was maybe 10-11 years old because that was the obvious choice. Then few years later when I first read about quicksort, I kind of already had an intuition to why that just might be a heck a of a lot faster than what I had used before. And also to why selection sort might actually be really, really slow.
I also think that coding and computer science are so tightly connected that in practice you can't do one without the other even if you wanted to. I also think there's no easy path to coding: you need to start from the lowest level and build from there. Or start a bit above the lowest level but go for a dive down later, and only then continue upward.
> Learning to code is a prerequisite for learning computer science.
I know what you mean, but there's a lot of people who have CS degrees and have /absolutely no idea/ how to code - when I was a Unix admin, this described most of my colleagues.
They knew sorting algorithms well enough to pass an exam, but parse a spreadsheet with some proposed file systems and make them? That was a big deal.
For example, I think I "invented" selection sort when I was maybe 10-11 years old because that was the obvious choice. Then few years later when I first read about quicksort, I kind of already had an intuition to why that just might be a heck a of a lot faster than what I had used before. And also to why selection sort might actually be really, really slow.
I also think that coding and computer science are so tightly connected that in practice you can't do one without the other even if you wanted to. I also think there's no easy path to coding: you need to start from the lowest level and build from there. Or start a bit above the lowest level but go for a dive down later, and only then continue upward.