> I think we should carefully figure out what skills should be taught, and what the best way to teach those skills are, keeping in mind that for a lot of first-year university students this may be their first introduction to using anything other than a web browser, office programs, and video games on a computer.
This is absolutely spot on. I used IDE Good/IDE Bad mostly as a way to get people to think about this, and clearly it worked :)
Yes, I’ve thought about it before, since at my university they started on an entirely-eclipse sort of syllabus, and then overcorrected massively to command line. A bunch of new CS undergrads were driven off because they thought that programming was mostly memorising arcane command line invocations just to get simple code to run, and that just doesn’t seem right to me.
Out of interest, your original article pointed out the potential use of repl.it as an alternative to Eclipse and friends, but isn’t it still the whole build-in-a-box experience?
This is absolutely spot on. I used IDE Good/IDE Bad mostly as a way to get people to think about this, and clearly it worked :)