As a middle school student in the early 90's we coded in basic on the Apple II. I loved it. I'm not sure fancy features like auto-indent are really necessary, n

As a middle school student in the early 90's we coded in basic on the Apple II. I loved it. I'm not sure fancy features like auto-indent are really necessary, nor would they detract from learning depending upon the goal. They're productivity enhancers for sure, and I suppose it depends on what you want to teach. If you're teaching algorithms through implementation, sure...might detract from the teaching process. If you're teaching people to go on to jobs right out of high school, then my goal for high school level students is to teach them to go into any environment that their employer might have. I can't tell you how many undergrads (my experience as an instructor while a grad student) I've had complain about an IDE that is unusable because it doesn't have feature X. When students show up with programming experience to college/job, I'd rather have their programming experience be transferrable to whatever editor is available (be it VIM, VI, Nano, MSVS, Xcode, whatever).