There's a number of points to this story and maybe one of the reasons I liked it so much is because it says things that are otherwise hard to describe, but here are two pointers:
- in the monastry they visit, no two things are equal. I read this as an overapplication of DRY.
- the monks speaks an extremely terse language that is so complicated that even their master have to think for a good while before he can say anything. In the story the master also speaks to the newbie in this language, implying that he either doesn't realize nobody else understands it, or maybe rather that he doesn't care so much about being helpful as he cares about being terse.
https://users.rust-lang.org/t/rust-koans/2408/4
And yes, I think it is useful to teach this.