Haha indeed. At work suddenly documentation and APIs are important, but it's all for/behind "skills". Before it was always "sure, that would be nice"...
I do welcome the improvements to doc and APIs this brings though!
At least in Belgium it's quite common for a lot of students to fail the first year (partly due to the difficulty, partly due to partying instead of studying). But it's not like it's really free, the tuition is cheap but the accomodation is expensive. I also don't think it's particularly difficult on purpose to filter out students, it's just that it's not overly expensive and a lot of people are unsure about what to study.
If you're porting a library, you can use the original implementation as an 'oracle' for your tests. Which means you only need a way to write/generate inputs, then verify the output matches the original implementation.
It doesn't work for everything of course but it's a nice way to bug-for-bug compatible rewrites.
Indeed, the Tcl implementation does this so e.g. `set d [dict] ; dict set d key value` can modify d in place instead of creating a copy (since everything is immutable).