Should Students Be Taught With or Without an IDE?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Saturday May 20, 2006 @03:50PM from the why-the-zero-sum dept.

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?

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Re:Not at first by sjames · 2006-05-21 03:40 · Score: 0, Redundant

vi does have a learning curve, but once learned is very fast and efficient. It's also a great bridge to an IDE later. Variations like elvis do good syntax highlighting, can invoke make and then take you to each error or warning, and if you add ctags, you can navigate quickly through the code.

So, DO start with vi. Later, the very same commands will work with the very IDE like features in vim or elvis.