Should Students Be Taught With or Without an IDE?

bblazer asks: "Beginning this next school year, there is a strong possibility I will be teaching an intro to Java and an intro to Python course at the local community college. I was wondering what the prevailing wisdom is when it comes to teaching languages - should students be taught with or without an IDE? I am a bit old school and wouldn't mind having them all use vi or emacs, but using a good IDE does have some advantages as well. I should note that the students I will be teaching will have had at least 1 semester of programming in VB or C++." Even though there is limited time in a semester, could a curriculum be constructed to accommodate both methods?

Comments

No Emacs either

[metamatic]

What I see in people that turn how to program with an IDE is they are tied to that IDE, they dont want to use another. Its like pulling teeth to get them to switch. The other problem they have is they know nothing about the compiler.

Same is true of a lot of people who use Emacs too much. It becomes impossible to get them to even try another program. Introduce them to some new concept like, say, an N-dimensional sparse matrix manipulation system with typed data cells, and they say "So, is there an emacs interface for this?" They read their e-mail in emacs, they read news in emacs, some of them even use emacs as a web browser and shell.

So I'd say start with a text editor. Something simple. For Java, get them at least as far as building a small project with a handful of files into a jar and running it. Then, you can say "So, now you get how it works, here's a tool that can save time and effort..." Then you introduce an IDE. And also Ant, ideally.

Also, I'd say don't force the students to use a particular IDE or editor. That's not the point of the class. If they want to do the assignments using NOTEPAD.EXE, let 'em.

Re:forgive my ignorance

[Anonymous Coward]

Dumbass. Integrated Drive Electronics interface, one of the most popular hard drive interfaces. If you or the author of the article would have simply used Google, you would find that information and the author would know that using IDE sucks and SCSI is like way better.

Re:I would say IDEs

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I've been developing software for 12 years and I still go back to emacs whenever I want to learn a new technique, technology, or toolkit. The dev work may take a little bit longer, but I learn so much more when I have to search through directories or look up an interface in the documentation that you just don't get with an IDE.

Whenever I'm trying to learn something new I get out the hard drive and move the bits around myself. IDEs like emacs just get in the way.

Without an IDE of course

[rollonet]

SATA is much better

Re:forgive my ignorance

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you, SATA FTW.

Re:Go with what they are familiar with.

[samkass]

Vim 7 was released less than 2 weeks ago. I'd hardly call that outdated.

Yeah, and COBOL2002 isn't outdated, either.

Re:Me too!

[mqj]

Yeah, it was fixed in cvs!

Nah...

[Morosoph]

Cat is the way to go. As follows:

$> cat > hello.c
#include <stdio.h>

int main (void) {
        printf ("Hello World!\n");
        return 0; /* success */
}
^d
$> gcc hello.c
$> ./a.out

IDE?

[Chris Mattern]

Nope, SCSI all the way!

Chris Mattern

Re:ed, em, en, ex, vi (Was: Re:Which came first?)

[Eudial]

Which springs the question: What was used to write ed? (Or was ed created in an explosion of bytes at the dawn of time?)

Yes, please enhance my job security...

[nixkuroi]

I say teach them with the IDE, so when they get in the real world and need to hack a way around a design limitation or integrate with a data provider that they can't bind a control to, they have to call someone like me who does. :) document.getElementById("indeed").parentNode.remov eChild(document.getElementById("indeed"));