Ah OK. But the context was "students in college ... who were just starting out". I would say they would be running their programs, at least initially, in an IDE

Ah OK. But the context was "students in college ... who were just starting out". I would say they would be running their programs, at least initially, in an IDE. And they should be using an IDE to develop: getting students to develop without IDE support is just unfair (although I know people get religious about using a text editor for code development). This is how I keep finding new grads who have no idea how to use a debugger e.g. just set a breakpoint and inspect variables.