ChatGPT as a teacher

Today I came to the conclusion that without a good understanding of asynchronous programming in Javascript, I cannot hope to come up with a game that uses asynchronous events for all player interaction and other asynchronous events to talk to a remote ChatGPT for NPC actions. My code was a mess, and even more important, after 3 refactorings of my game.js class following ChatGPT's suggestions, my mind was a mess as well. And (see other posts) I don't think that handing ChatGPT the control over the overall concepts, design, architecture, is a good idea.

So I asked it to explain asynchronous JS programming to me. And it did. Quite exceptionally.

See, in normal life you can learn something like this in several ways:

• You can read a book. I actually have a good JS book. A very, very tedious affair. I have 30+ years of serious programming experience (not counting my "geek teenager programs the heck out of his Sharp MZ-80A with 48K RAM and 1K ROM" time here). A JS book is 95% redundant to somebody who knows C, C++, Java. It doesn't allow me on focusing what I need to know.
• You can watch a youtube video or an e-learning. Similar, with a different medium. 
• You can attend a classroom training. Costs a lot of money, gives you good results, even though most top developers are not interested in providing such training, so you might get a mediocre developer as your trainer who, well, hallucinates explanations sometimes. Yes, I had this happen in very expensive classroom trainings.
• You can hire a developer/teacher to train you individually. If you're a millionaire this is clearly the best of all options.

In my experience with learning Javascript, ChatGPT actually comes fairly close to the individual trainer. Yes, it might hallucinate at any time. But it offers explanations in a clear style - not being bothered like many - particularly German - book authors to use nifty language that shows that this author is a really bright master of every nuance of the language. Also it provides good examples that bring the content across. 

But the best aspect is that whatever I don't understand about the explanation, I can ask about it. And it will not raise an eyebrow but take every question seriously (and there are stupid questions) and answer them. 

With ChatGPT I can focus my learning on exactly the aspect I want to understand. If I need followup leaning (because I haven't got the level of understanding of functional programming in JS that I need) I can get that as well. I get practical examples that I can try out, also to avoid learning hallucinations instead of facts, and good responses to everything I don't get. And I learn exactly what I need for the task at hand or for wherever my curiosity takes me. In my app, there is no need yet for chainable promises and promise concurrency. So I'll spare that for later. This might be a doubtful approach, but it's okay to know a subset of what JS can do as long as the subject is correct and consistent.

I almost feel like that millionaire with the 1:1 teacher now.

Here’s a part of our dialog…