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I don't think it's that valuable to improve IDE-less software development skills. Just because some Unix nerds find it cool to play with text files, avoid moder

I don't think it's that valuable to improve IDE-less software development skills. Just because some Unix nerds find it cool to play with text files, avoid modern software development tools or program in date languages like C it shouldn't be desirable for a computer science major. Computer science should focus on long-live principles, the Unix philosophy may have a lot of good worth to keep principles, but kinda nothing in the software engineering space should suggest we've already approximated perfect solutions and nothing could be improved.

odyssey7 7y ago
Working with an IDE is important experience. However, speaking as someone who tutors CS students, there's a lot that people can miss about what they're doing when they have only ever worked in Eclipse. There's something enlightening and empowering about tangibly having a specific file that you wrote, applying a compiler to it to produce an executable, and then invoking it yourself. It gives a better sense of ownership of the process that people don't always feel when they load a project into and IDE and fill in lines of code until the play button stops telling them what they did is wrong.
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
Your comment shows a lot of naivety. Text is near universal, C still makes the world go ‘round and modern doesn’t mean graphical.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  Text is not universal. Instead, there is a nearly infinite variety of output formats which consists of 96 printable ASCII characters (or perhaps a superset of those characters), that may be unstructured, structured, or semi-structured, using a variety of often ad-hoc and poorly documented formatting for values, and a (sometimes surprisingly small) subset of the outputs can even be read in again as inputs. A great example of this is CSV. It's a wonderfully simple format... so simple that there is considerable variety in things such as "how do you quote a field," "how do you delimit fields" (considering its name is Comma-Separated Values, you'd think everyone would agree it's a comma), and "what characters are legal within fields," let alone the semantic interpretation questions of "is there a header row", "is this column numeric or textual or something else," etc.
- verinus 7y ago
  but a common misconception of programming is that we write text- we do not! we formulate abstraction that are stored in files. Still I am not in the least interested in files (a problem I have with most IDEs) that make up my component but in packages/namespaces, classes, functions, etc.

odyssey7 7y ago

Working with an IDE is important experience. However, speaking as someone who tutors CS students, there's a lot that people can miss about what they're doing when they have only ever worked in Eclipse. There's something enlightening and empowering about tangibly having a specific file that you wrote, applying a compiler to it to produce an executable, and then invoking it yourself. It gives a better sense of ownership of the process that people don't always feel when they load a project into and IDE and fill in lines of code until the play button stops telling them what they did is wrong.

JustSomeNobody 7y ago

Your comment shows a lot of naivety. Text is near universal, C still makes the world go ‘round and modern doesn’t mean graphical.

jcranmer 7y ago
Text is not universal. Instead, there is a nearly infinite variety of output formats which consists of 96 printable ASCII characters (or perhaps a superset of those characters), that may be unstructured, structured, or semi-structured, using a variety of often ad-hoc and poorly documented formatting for values, and a (sometimes surprisingly small) subset of the outputs can even be read in again as inputs. A great example of this is CSV. It's a wonderfully simple format... so simple that there is considerable variety in things such as "how do you quote a field," "how do you delimit fields" (considering its name is Comma-Separated Values, you'd think everyone would agree it's a comma), and "what characters are legal within fields," let alone the semantic interpretation questions of "is there a header row", "is this column numeric or textual or something else," etc.
verinus 7y ago
but a common misconception of programming is that we write text- we do not! we formulate abstraction that are stored in files. Still I am not in the least interested in files (a problem I have with most IDEs) that make up my component but in packages/namespaces, classes, functions, etc.