13 ms·

Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

276 points by NoraCodes 7y ago

ngngngng 7y ago
I completely agree. IDEs obscure the behavior of tools and languages. It's the last thing a student needs. I've been talking for a while about writing a course that teaches programming in 2 or 3 languages side by side to basically so the opposite of this. The specific quirks of languages or the things they obscure with magic melt away when you look at languages side by side. I wish university would teach in this way.
- codysc 7y ago
  I carry this thought process over into my current life. When I start with a new technology/language/etc. I try to start barebones command line, text editor. I transition quickly into more visual / abstracting tools, but that first foray into the guts really helps ground me with a better understanding of what's actually happening.
- takeda 7y ago
  UCLA has a class that does this, you have 10 weeks to learn 5 languages and write a non trivial assignment in each: http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/syllabus.html http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/syllabus.html http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/homework.html http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/homework.html The languages change over the years, but the goal is to have them touch different programming paradigms.
  - afarrell 7y ago
    Thats a different argument, and a much stronger one. "Universities should offer a class on comparative programming languages and language tooling." is much different than "Intro-to-programming classes should not have a strongly-recommended IDE"
    - takeda 7y ago
      I was referring to the second part of his post. Also this class is not introduction to programming it is upper division and considered one of tougher classes in terms of workload. The assignments aren't trivial. Take look at them: http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/homework.html http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/homework.html
    - NoraCodes 7y ago
      I actually think that would mostly confuse a lot of new undergrads. Fundamentals first, variety later (but it's definitely important!)
      - afarrell 7y ago
        I agree. The intro class should use whatever IDE & config will most enable them to teach the fundamentals. Understanding the details of packages and javac and other things should be left for a later class which can put them in the context of other languages.
  - touisteur 7y ago
    Oh I had a very interesting class in eng. school about programming languages paradigms. About subtle differences between different implementations of the same concept. Ada, C++, Java, C# (could've gone to functional languages but the lesson was painful enough with these 4). Type-erasure, explicit/implicit/partial template instantiation, visibility rules. And then design patterns, in all those languages. How a singleton makes no sense in a language that's not 'full' object and has 'packages' (not the java ones), how GC/RAII/controlled-types change the patterns. It was both a course on 'using language concepts correctly, picking them carefully for a specific need and not 'to avoid writing 3 more lines of code' and also a lesson in 'how can you paint yourself in a corner and prevent yourself from handling the simplest of requirements change'... Very interesting to see how our mind is shaped by the tools we use.
  - NoraCodes 7y ago
    My small liberal arts school has this as well. It's a great idea but, at least for me, it was hamstrung by the professors being too reliant on their IDEs.
- gundmc 7y ago
  I can see the merit of this, but as an anecdotal counterpoint my first programming class was Fortran 77 using gedit (in the late 2000s). The delayed feedback of whitespace and syntax errors at compile time was painful, slowed down my learning process and distracted from the principles we should have been learning.
  - NoraCodes 7y ago
    Perhaps the problem is that Fortran 77 is, like Java, not the best introductory programming language?
- eternalban 7y ago
  University programs exist to prepare workers for the industry, as a general goal. A subset of students are either already hardcore or will become hardcore developers, cum computer scientists. How should a university 'optimize' their pedagogical approach so that all students are maximally rewarded by their education? There is no question in my mind that you are correct, in principle. But I wonder if what you propose would in fact result in higher attrition rates. With the current approach, the majority benefit from an IDE that reduces the 'cognitive surface' of the "programming environment", and for those who prefer or gravitate towards the underlying layers, no one will prevent them from firing up e.g. Vim and maven. That said, yes, don't make students use Eclipse. Make them use IDEA or VS something. /g
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > University programs exist to prepare workers for the industry, as a general goal. I don't think that it's true that the general goal of University of CS programs is to prepare students for the software dev industry.
    - EdwardDiego 7y ago
      It is in my country. We routinely attend jobs fairs put on by their CS departments alongside every other software dev firm, we take on interns in their 2nd CS year, etc. etc. Hell, they're even learning version control (mainly Git, some SVN) in CS degrees now, which was a nice change to see start coming through in the grads we interview. Although we're seeing universities now start offering Engineering degrees in software with a far more "real-world" requirement including mandatory internships and an industry sponsored research project.
      - bmn__ 7y ago
        Don't you have apprenticeships in your country? University programs as I know them prepare the enrolled for a career in science and are typically far removed from concerns of practicability or applicability.
- mettamage 7y ago
  CS50 looks quite like what you're describing. One learns: - C - Python (+ Flask) - JavaScript - SQL I think this was the order. They learn C the most.
  - NoraCodes 7y ago
    That sounds wonderful! A real overview of the programming landscape, and definitely a good start assuming they follow my other points as well. I'd love to take that course.
    - scns 7y ago
      You can do that on edx.org
  - JackFr 7y ago
    As someone who started with C and then made a really hard effort to become an expert C programmer, when later in life I was introduced to Smalltalk and Lisp, I was angry that C had warped my brain and I could only think of programming in the context of a physical machine. I feel it would have been much better to go in the opposite direction.
1f60c 7y ago
Suggestion: in the submission title, replace "Eclipse" with "An IDE".
- barnaclejive 7y ago
  yep.. I came here to read why Eclipse sucks compared to IntelliJ or something. Turns out, he hates _all_ IDEs.
  - 1f60c 7y ago
    > he she[0], but yeah. [0]: https://twitter.com/noradotcodes https://twitter.com/noradotcodes
  - _ZeD_ 7y ago
    I really need to tell you: Eclipse really rocks against other IDEs
dvt 7y ago
> ... it insulates the student from the javac command line program, and the command line environment itself Such a misguided article. The Java language has (quite literally) nothing to do with `javac`. In fact, there's a lot of other compilers out there. Taking a Java class should not focus on the intricacies and weirdness of Java compiler command line interfaces. It seems pretty amateurish to argue in favor of it. Case in point: back in high school, I learned C++ using a Borland compiler (and I haven't touched `bcc` in the 15 years since then, even though I've written plenty of C++ in the meantime). > ... imports and file naming requirements. These, again, are (compiler) implementation details and should not be part of a generalized Java curriculum. > And of course, mathematics is the foundation of computer science. Stuff like this can be misleading and even though not completely wrong (discrete math, logic, metalogic, mathematical logic are sorta' kinda' similar), it's just wrong enough[1] to lead people astray. [1] https://www.scott-a-s.com/cs-is-not-math/ https://www.scott-a-s.com/cs-is-not-math/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- agumonkey 7y ago
  it's a regular issue, the more layers between the actual tool (JVM) the less you will need to master, but at the same time the first thing you'll learn is to forget how to use javac or any compiler and just import projects configs or let tools infer stuff for you. In my personal case, knowing about classpaths the hard way was my only path to salvation. Otherwise I was blindly tweaking IDEs project configs without any idea what was happening.
- Nightshaxx 7y ago
  The point of the article is the very concept that the compiler and the Java runtime environment are not the same thing (which an IDE obfuscates to some extent) is what he wants students to learn early on. (And details like that). This leads into a lot of important concepts around how programming languages are seen by the computer.
  - dvt 7y ago
smitty1e 7y ago
Related classic rant: "Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? Ruminations on the Psychology and Aesthetics of Coding" http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.htm...
stefan_ 7y ago
If there is one thing that Eclipse doesn't do is insulate anyone. Half of Java Enterprise development involves various concoctions of Eclipse projects. I'm not sure what the difference is between a student learning about Eclipse idiosyncrasies or .DS_STORE files. One topic is as pointless as the other.
pacetherace 7y ago
While I agree with not using very advanced IDEs. It is important to have the means to quickly navigate standard libraries. MSDN gets my vote for that.
ericmcer 7y ago
I like the idea of starting in a browser. It is a more familiar way to get people used to the concept of text controlling behavior. The jump to compilation and executables might still be difficult, but it’s way better than students on their second year who only know how to run their programs by clicking a green triangle.
DrKabab 7y ago
Harvard's CS50 does a great job at this. My first intro to CS was through this course, and I'm grateful I did it this way rather than wait till I was taught in the "broken" way at college.
enhdless 7y ago
I agree that the file system is not emphasized enough anymore, and I've met a fair share of students who struggle with file paths. Also, in the last section: > or UC Berkeley (oh, I’m sorry, “Cal”) A bit off-topic, but as a Berkeley student, I was a bit amused/confused here, what's the sarcasm in the parenthetical about? According to our official branding guidelines[1] both are acceptable, though Cal is mostly used in athletic contexts. [1] pg34-35, https://brand.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Berkeley-Brand-Manual-accessible.pdf https://brand.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Berkel...
- NoraCodes 7y ago
  > as a Berkeley student, I was a bit amused/confused here, what's the sarcasm in the parenthetical about? Mostly a dig at the UCB faculty and admin, who act like they're better than the rest of the UC. (I'm a UCSD brat.)
bdcravens 7y ago
I tend to agree, but I wonder how many in the "IDE bad" camp would agree that in order to obtain your drivers license, you must pass the drivers test on a manual transmission?
- mech422 7y ago
  Gotta admit - that appeals to me :-P U.S. drivers licenses are too easy to get as it is... I don't think my sister even had to parallel park on hers.
  - lordalch 7y ago
    Since I got my driver's license over a decade ago, I've had to parallel-park less than ten times. I've probably changed a flat tire more often. I think you would find that the vast majority of drivers in the US don't parallel park even once per year. Furthermore, an increasing fraction of new cars can park automatically. The chief value of having a road test, in my mind, is to force most teens to learn to drive in a structured program that introduces rules of the road and safe habits. Parallel parking is rare and not dangerous, so we shouldn't waste the limited hours that teens spend with professional driving educators on it.
    - stordoff 7y ago
      > I think you would find that the vast majority of drivers in the US don't parallel park even once per year. In the UK, I had the exact opposite experience. Immediately after passing my test, I was parallel parking daily, and I've frequently been in situations where parallel parking is the only way to find a parking space. IMO it _would_ have been dangerous had I not learnt how to do it and was confident doing it. I'd have likely have been too distracted thinking about what I'm trying to do rather than paying sufficient attention to my surroundings. I know I was when I was first learning, and I failed my first driving test because I didn't adequately check my surroundings before starting to reverse.
- catalogia 7y ago
  I don't really care whether or not other people use IDEs, but I lament not learning to drive on a manual transmission.
cutchin 7y ago
I'm not sure I agree much with this. When I first started learning Java I had six or seven years of programming experience and I still found dealing with matters of classpath and javac remarkably complicated. I had things down well enough with the tools I used before, but it all seemed so foreign in the Java world. And to this day I find junior devs struggle with the same things unless they have a maven/gradle project all set up for them. I'm all for folks learning these skills eventually, but in a first-year CS class I'd really rather students worry about the language and general concepts of writing software. Lots of javascript tutorials start off with opening and browser's javascript console and typing out some simple stuff and I don't think people would tell them they need to jump straight into node.js and webpack. All the other intricacies of writing systems will come to them but I find something uniquely wonderful about sitting and writing code, and if we're lucky we'll find students who can have that same experience. I'd rather meet them where they are and talk purely of the language and core concepts, and introduce them to the ugly details as their progress dictates.
- afarrell 7y ago
  > and general concepts of writing software. Especially if it is their first experience writing code. Until a student learns to tolerate the discomfort of "the machine isn't doing what I want for some inscrutable reason", it makes no sense to throw them into package-management errors.
- therealmarv 7y ago
  Actually I agree for the Java world here. Thanks to the design of Java and many Java libraries you cannot write a little more complex Java code from your mind. Even importing all this nested OOP libraries is complicated without an IDE. For me Java is really a language which is impossible or too time consuming to master without a good IDE. Working for many years in the python world professionally some people are still amazed that I'm essentially using more or less a normal text editor. IDE is optional for many languages but for some languages it's a strong requirement.
  - EdwardDiego 7y ago
    When I was teaching myself to code I started writing Java in Notepad. Not Notepad++, just Notepad. And it was as painful as you'd expect, put me right off Java (most of my learning was in Python), and didn't really teach me much that I now use as a developer in a JVM shop.
afarrell 7y ago
> Most importantly, though, it limits the ability of their peers to learn. If a 300-level software engineering class which budgeted a week to teach basic version control skills has to take a two-day detour to teach the Windows users how to get rid of the CRLFs in their commits, and teach the Mac users to remove the .DS_Store files from their repositories, and get everyone set up in Eclipse EGIT, that’s wasted time. If the professor has to schedule time with students outside of class to demonstrate their code because so many students aren’t able to submit their code in a form that successfully runs on the professor’s computer, that’s wasted time for both professors and students, and it undermines important lessons about portability and good practices. This is might be an argument against a particular IDE setup for a class, but it isn't an argument against IDEs in general. Instead it is an argument for providing a config file to make these problems go away. > When students have only ever programmed in Java using some bespoke learning library provided by their professor, it will take them much longer than necessary to figure out other languages, other libraries, and other approaches. The article doesn't support the case that an intro class using an IDE prevents students from learning anything else. The class doesn't set people back--it merely fails to move them forward in that way. I agree that it is important to teach this eventually. But it should be through teaching it deliberately. (EDIT: Someone else posted a link to a class which compares different languages and their tooling side-by-side. That sounds fantastic.) I have yet to see a class which can do a good job of teaching how package management works to a degree that the student can then confidently debug weird setuptools errors. I've been looking for such a class since 2009.
The_rationalist 7y ago
Defering learning of implementation details is virtuous and on the plus side, intellij IDEs have state of the art static analysis that show to the coder anti patterns and help it rewrite them in a cleaner way, and with an explanation. Autocompletion and integrated documentation do increase discoverability and learning of the language, not the reverse. BTW intellij has launched an IDE specialized for teaching: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2019/10/intellij-idea-edu-eap/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2019/10/intellij-idea-edu-ea...
Havoc 7y ago
Yeah I found Eclipse a pain to set up for python the first time I tried. Kept throwing weird Java errors and GUI glitches. Abandoned that plan very fast
erdos4d 7y ago
Wait, I shouldn't make students learn the tool they will be forced to use when they get a job? Um, no.
- nullc 7y ago
  People who learn the tool alone are substantially unhireable. When you hire a developer you usually need them to also be at least be something of an expert computer user, especially if they're going to be working on a small team without 20 other experts to micromanage them. Over-reliance on the IDEs leaves people appliance operators that are lost when there isn't a magic button to press. It isn't just an issue in the job market. "Programmers" who aren't sufficiently advanced computer users can't advance their own projects in academia either-- they're stuck working on precooked assignments. I suspect this is one of the forces that has resulted in academic research being utterly starved for competent software engineering (though the main one remains that competent software engineers can get stable high paying jobs, and academia provides them with neither).
- oreally 7y ago
  Always good to get students to dig deeper, even if it's for their initial 1st/2nd semester, and especially if they're going to be programming long term. But ofc let them have the freedom to choose afterwards.
msingh_5 7y ago
I guess the sentiment is more like "Don't make students start programming in IDEs first" I get it. It shields them from understanding what's happening underneath. But not everybody is interested or needs to know all the things happening underneath, and its okay. If they're going to learn the whole stack, they will.
- afarrell 7y ago
  Even for someone who is interested in knowing what happens underneath. To succeed at actions, it important not to expand the scope of what you're trying to do too broadly.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y ago
The music analogy here would be: We'd like you to learn the C major scale, but first, please become familiar with Pro Tools.
dacracot 7y ago
I agree, and it has been going on for a very long time. I have coworkers who's productivity (if you can call it that) would slide to zero if you took away Eclipse. If it isn't implemented in an Eclipse plugin, well forget it. Setting up the deployment environment is so far outside of their capability as to be a joke. And these people have been out of college for over a decade.
jimbob45 7y ago
This can fuck right off. My elitist university decided that if it wasn’t pure C built on a Linux box, then it wasn’t worth using. Consequently, I never learned how much more enjoyable and quick programming could be until I used VS at my first job. Even worse, I was a VS novice, struggling to perform even the most rudimentary of debugging techniques, despite being fairly fluent in GDB/Valgrind.
- qppo 7y ago
  I had the opposite experience. My university decided that they would standardize student development environments on vanilla Visual Studio, put everything that students would ever want into a single header (i swear it was something like "header.h") that you copy/pasted into your project folder and that was it. We didn't even use the terminal. It was tedious as hell to learn everything else in real world development, like static versus dynamic linking, include/linker paths, make, system libraries, and so on. Like as in myself nor my classmates would have any idea those things existed after two semesters of C++ programming courses. The moral here is that education needs a degree of breadth. Teaching CS students involves three concepts - Computer Science, Writing Code, and Writing Software. The dependency graph between those topics on what knowledge and tools are needed contains cycles.
- NoraCodes 7y ago
  I'm sorry you had that experience, but you'll note that this isn't what I'm actually suggesting; my suggestion is Python or another dynamic language on any platform so long as it's standardized and accessible, for which I give the example of Ubuntu, but I also mention that Windows with Powershell is an option.
gwbas1c 7y ago
> What they can’t do, unless they’ve figured it out on their own, is operate a computer outside of the confines of the IDE they’ve been taught. Understanding what a file is and what a text editor should be prerequisites for entering a computer science department. Someone who doesn't understand these concepts has no business learning to program. At my "not MIT" school, it was expected that most incoming CS students understood some basic programming before they entered school. A CD department that tolerates students who don't know what a file is probably has other problems.
- SaxonRobber 7y ago
  That excludes a huge number of students who will have never had the experience to try programming before university. I never did any programming before my first year, I was planning on going into economics. But then I took an elective in CS and it became my major. I wasn’t alone either, most of the students were not programmers previously.
- augustt 7y ago
  At actual MIT there are no expectations like this.
- stordoff 7y ago
  > At my "not MIT" school, it was expected that most incoming CS students understood some basic programming before they entered school. At Cambridge (UK), this is _not_ the case. They merely note that "some knowledge of procedural programming is useful"[1] and "[n]o prior knowledge of programming is required"[2]. The main thing they are looking for, in terms of qualifications, is mathematics, so you'd typically see an A-level in mathematics plus two further ones in further mathematics, the physical sciences, or computing depending on what your school offers. At interview (for two colleges), I was not asked about programming - the first was purely mathematics based, and the second was primarily maths based with some CS concepts introduced to see how you thought about and were able to manipulate the information given in the interview. It's not something you were necessarily expected to know. Until this year, the introductory CS modules (making up 25% of the first year's content) were available to natural sciences students, so you would have students from a fairly wide range of backgrounds _successfully_ learning CS and to program (the maths modules, also making up 25%, are still shared, for what it's worth). [1] https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/entry https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/entry [2] https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/computer-science https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/computer-s...
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
>Using Java or Python in a professional IDE like IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans, PyCharm, or Eclipse is not a good first introduction to programming for computer science students, whether they’re in the field to become web developers, systems software engineers, or academic computer science researchers. // So "for computer science students". Which seems like too major a thing to miss out of the title. Also, how does webdev fit in here: seems like webdevs should probably be using IDEs from lesson 2. And I say that as someone who started their web content production path writing HTML in pico.
ashton314 7y ago
The author brings this up as a reason for using an IDE: > This is valuable in an introductory course, as it avoids wasting class time and lowers the barrier to entry and then proceeds to argue why other things are more important than that. I don't like Eclipse or other IDEs, having watched my fellow students get stymied by basic issues that I could resolve with one or two relatively simple instructions on the command line. I think IDEs can be a crutch that programmers ought to learn to do without. Learning what the "real" tools are will pay dividends—quickly too. That being said, I think it's important that the barrier to entry be low. Java almost necessitates the use of an IDE. There's so much "enterprise" cruft involved in doing the simplest things that, unless you have an IDE to hide it, you're going to confuse beginners. A better choice of language and tooling can help here. I think starting off with something like Racket would be best. Those who need an IDE (out of laziness, familiarity, whatever) can use DrRacket, and then switch to running their programs from the command line shortly thereafter with next to no transition overhead.
- dionian 7y ago
  i agree with everyone saying you shouldnt use IDE as a crutch.. but as a seasoned Java dev, it is probably my main exception to the rule as well. I would just recommend intellij over eclipse for beginners, but its better than nothing.
uk_programmer 7y ago
I agree with sentiment of this. I meet a lot of developers that cannot function outside of the IDE (in my case Visual Studio). As a consequence they struggle when the IDE fails.
pkamb 7y ago
"public static void main string bracket bracket args" "public static void main string bracket bracket args" "public static void main string bracket bracket args" kind of sad that my first exposure to programming of any kind at University was just repeating that mantra.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Wait until you learn that you can use public static void main(String... args) ;)
  - pkamb 7y ago
    I gave up Java immediately after that class!
- bori5 7y ago
  You missed two parentheses
lxe 7y ago
> The issue is, as Kevlin Henney is fond of saying, “Software is nothing but the details.” When students don’t understand what a file is, or haven’t ever edited text in anything but Microsoft Word and don’t realize they can edit code outside of an IDE3, they will not be able to do the crucial work of self-directed learning that is a hallmark of all computer science success. Not sure why the aggressive comments here, but I agree with this. IDE for learning programming ends up shielding you from reality that you should probably understand before you use an IDE.
- ativzzz 7y ago
  People who don't know what a file is need to take a computer literacy class before they can jump into something like programming. An IDE is fine to hide programming related magic for a beginner, but if it needs to hide things like a filesystem, file extensions, navigating through advanced options in simple software like word and internet browsers, or how to use google to help diagnose technical issues, that person is in way over their heads.
sumukh1 7y ago
I used to spend a lot of time thinking about this while helping build software & TA'ing for Berkeley's introductory course (which uses Python & Scheme) and I largely agree with the author. If you're wondering why the author ignores large schools, it's because they have the resources to invest in this. Here's a sample of the things the efforts that Berkeley did for their introductory course [1] * Online tools to run & visualize code execution directly from the online textbook (ex: https://composingprograms.com/pages/16-higher-order-functions.html#functions-as-returned-values https://composingprograms.com/pages/16-higher-order-function...) * Easy submission for students (no git in CS1, no scp, no printing) * Instructor autograding for all assignments so the course staff could focus on reviewing code for style/other components. * Automatically backing up student code * In some assignments, there were automated hints for syntax, styling, and even correctness [2, 3] * Online collaborative editing for partner assignments [4] * Full time staff allocated to building teaching infrastructure to "reduce accidental complexities when using code to solve problems" * Completely hosted environments (via Jupyter Notebooks or Scratch) for courses with a lot of non-majors. [1] https://cs61a.org https://cs61a.org [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3059009.3059058 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3059009.3059058 [3] https://okpy.org/about/publications/ https://okpy.org/about/publications/ [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=polTBnMXGQI&rel=0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=polTBnMXGQI&rel=0
BeetleB 7y ago
In the introductory classes I took, there was no IDE. We telnet into a server, and were taught Pico as an editor (although you were free to use vi or emacs if you wanted). You compiled using g++. You did everything via the command line. Most of the problems the author is pointing out existed there as well. The author is misguided in assuming that IDE's are the cause.
jcrawfordor 7y ago
I can't help but feel like this article is less a condemnation of IDEs in introductory teaching and more a condemnation of java in introductory teaching. It feels like the use of Eclipse or IntelliJ in intro CS courses is so common in large part because Java has such relatively complex tooling and language conventions. I've never seen someone intro Python with an IDE, because it's extremely easy to use Python without one. The same goes for C, and indeed all of the intro C classes I've seen have gone without an IDE. Java, though... you really could spend an extended part of the course just getting everyone setting up their first file and using the compiler correctly, if it's the first language.
- vips7L 7y ago
  I don't see how java tooling is any more complex than any other language, they all have learning curves. Even Python has complexities around venv, requirements, pipfile etc. C's tooling in particular is probably the worst. You have to learn the compiler, the linker, or a 3rd party tool like cmake or meson. Using an IDE in Java is a choice just like picking PyCharm is for python.
  - NoraCodes 7y ago
    I agree with you in general, but here I am discussing introductory CS programs. It's very hard for an intro CS student to build and run a Java program without an IDE, even with help from the professor. It's completely trivial for that same student to write and run most of the Python programs they'll be doing in their intro class after having installed _just Python_.
  - jcrawfordor 7y ago
    I feel like this kind of makes the point though... while all of this tooling does exist for Python, it's very easy to use Python without any of it at all. So it can be relegated to more of an advanced, 'production-ready' topic, e.g. in a software engineering course. Indeed, I've never seen an intro course in either Python or C that touches on any of this tooling, save one professor who distributed a standard makefile for his intro C course - but I'm honestly not sure why. It usually suffices just fine to have the students call gcc themselves, the projects they work on in the first year aren't big enough to make this cumbersome. While that's partially true of Java, it's less true of Java. More of the tooling around Java is de facto required.
jbverschoor 7y ago
Actually.. for the basic basics it's fine to do let them use a text editor and compiler. But after like 2 files, it's easier to learn the language due to autocomplete and errorchecking. The whole compilation / dependency stack, well I don't think that's the issue here.
zmmmmm 7y ago
I thought this was going to be the standard Eclipse bashing and then found it was more fundamental than that. In many ways Eclipse is one of the less problematic IDEs because it does expose a lot of the underlying warts... it's one of the reasons people dislike it (among others, to be clear - memory usage, less fluid ergonmics in many other ways). But one of the reasons I have stuck with it is that, like when you understand Git at a fundamental level it all "makes sense", Eclipse has a better direct relationship to the underlying mechanics than other IDEs I've used.
nunez 7y ago
Truth. I work with plenty of engineers that have only written Java with Eclipse or Jetbrains. Many have a lot of trouble getting their app to compile locally when asked to do so upon moving the app into containers. Many also had issues even writing software upon trying to use something like Vi or VSCode. At some point, the training wheels need to come off.
lonelappde 7y ago
This article is a confused mess with no point. Sure it would be nice to teach students everything at first. But that's obviously impossible.
- mr_toad 7y ago
  People often forget how few hours go into a typical university paper. It’s not unlikely that a programmer with a full-time job could put in more hours in just one month than a student would for an entire introduction to programming paper. It’s unrealistic to expect to be able to cover all aspects of programming in such a short time.
bcruddy 7y ago
I feel like people upvoted this because it said don't use eclipse but didn't read the article. Now I'm questioning my sanity - given a choice, do professional developers choose to use eclipse? The question is somewhat loaded given the previous statement based on my own biases but I've never written java professionally so excuse my ignorance.
- vips7L 7y ago
  Most java devs use intellij. But the eclipse language server powers the vs-code plugin for java. It's quite good and it's what I use personally.
  - bcruddy 7y ago
    Totally makes sense as a plugin - I love vscode for both golang and javascript. The IDE itself seems clunky but I'm not against IDEs themselves.
- blendo 7y ago
  Eclipse seems to have carved out a popular niche in the field of embedded C and C++. (JetBrains, please take note.)
Guest42 7y ago
In my academic experience netbeans was used and it seemed to simplify things.
rschulman 7y ago
My first year CS classes went by SCIP and were taught in scheme. Of course, I went to a place that didn't much distinguish between comp sci and comp eng, so what do I know?
ineedasername 7y ago
Honestly I wasn't aware that current curriculums used any sort of advanced IDE's. When I took courses in the late 90's & early 00's, from assembly, c++, java and python the focus was on minimal text editors and command line compile, link etc. Though for python, Idle was promoted, but that's pretty bare bones relatively speaking. I wasn't aware that a shift away from basics had occurred.
thewebcount 7y ago
> First, in a Java-focused curriculum, it insulates the student from the javac command line program, and the command line environment itself. I take exception to this line of thinking. Students should not be using the command line for programming. I believe that forcing students to learn to use command line tools is the reason why so much software has such horrible user experience. They learn that users don't matter unless they've steeped themselves in the arcana of each particular program and have practically become programmers themselves. > Second, it catches some basic mistakes and allows the student to defer learning about the finnicky language requirements that aren’t deemed core to the curriculum, like imports and file naming requirements. I had the exact opposite experience. At university, they sat us down at a Unix shell with almost no instruction on the shell or the compiler. We spent so much time learning the finicky shell requirements (and which we had no clear understanding were part of the shell and not the compiler itself or something else), that we were sidelined from understanding what the compiler was telling us or how it worked. You'd run your program and if it gave you an error 11, well, you just read and re-read it until you noticed something off. Nowadays with an IDE and a static analyzer, it can show my code and show the exact path of execution that will lead to an invalid memory access before I've even run it. Students can learn to find problems themselves because it's laid out right in front of their eyes in relatively-understandable java or C or whatever language they're programming in. They don't need to worry about, "Oh when I compile on this machine, I have to specify the -I argument to the compiler for includes, but on machines I actually use in real life, I don't have to specify anything because it finds all the files I'm actually using because I put them into the IDE myself and can see their relationships." > it’s crucial to introduce these inconvenient details eventually. Why? If I'm going to be downloading my IDE from the Internet or an App Store why the heck should I ever learn fiddly Unix commands? I'm writing GUI-based applications. I don't need to understand any of that crap if I don't want to. It's like saying you can't be a taxi driver if you don't understand how the carburetor works. Really? My job is to drive the car around, not to fix it. I know a good mechanic who can do that if the need arises. If they want to learn it, then all the better, but it shouldn't be a requirement. > What they can’t do, unless they’ve figured it out on their own, is operate a computer outside of the confines of the IDE they’ve been taught. On the contrary, I had no problem operating the GUI-based computers of my day. It was the bizarre, often contradictory commands in the Unix shell that baffled me. Their names were often stupid puns, their "help" pages did no such thing, and I wasted years learning a bunch of stuff that ended up not being very helpful in the real world. > When students have only ever programmed in Java using some bespoke learning library provided by their professor, it will take them much longer than necessary to figure out other languages, other libraries, and other approaches. That has nothing to do with IDEs. That has to do with a deficient teaching environment, and is the exact same problem I described above, which sounds like what the author is advocating. > Teaching someone to use git is very difficult if they’ve never been taught that a file is an logical unit composed of bytes and metadata. No, teaching someone to use git is very difficult because it was designed to be difficult because the self-absorbed creator thinks that people should have to suffer to become good programmers. It's just sadistic. > Students need to know how to use computers before they can program them in a serious way. I agree, and what the author is proposing sounds like the opposite of that to me. > After the first foray into programming, take time to teach students about the UNIX command line. Ugh. I disagree strongly with this sentiment. CS students need to get away from the mentality that Unix is the be-all-end-all of operating systems and programming environments and the quicker that happens the better in my opinion.
yters 7y ago
I like Eclipse, but now that I know my way about, it's much easier to knock out a small Java problem on the command line than to fire up Eclipse, setup a project, etc. Then there's all the magical metadata and whatnot that can get screwed up. Much less mental overhead and less things to worry about on the Linux command line. Plus, I can do more with the commandline tools. I think students in general will be more versatile if they start with the command line, and then graduate to Eclipse. That way, they'll realize what they lose and gain in an IDE.
cordite 7y ago
I used to do C, C++, Haskell, and php in sublime when I was a student. But I greatly disagree about students using IDEs on languages like Java. Getting familiar with debuggers, stepping around, that's absolutely a necessary skill--unless you want to go into stdio, or echo based debugging (which is what I'd do with the languages above).
joppy 7y ago
I think that this is mixing up two different skills. The first skill is learning to program, and in particular learning to program data structures, or algorithms, or whatever. For this you don't care at all how your code builds, you care about correctness and easy to use testing infrastructure, and an IDE like IntelliJ or Eclipse is going to be almost frictionless for that. Teaching command line necessities together with this provides nothing of value for this skill. If I'm trying to get an algorithm right, I don't care at all about how my code builds, I care that it is easy to hit the "recompile and run tests" button. I also think that Java is a decent choice of language for this. The second skill is learning how to build, version control, package and distribute software, and for this you really need to learn the common tools used in the industry. Which in addition to the IDE, is use of the Unix/Windows command line, git, compilers, Makefiles and build systems, and so on. Here you really need to care about the details - for example, such a project could be to take a previous project and package it so that it runs on a computer without Java/Python/etc installed. I think the problem is that many universities never have a course on this second skillset, and so while for teaching the first skillset they choose appropriate tools (in my opinion), they leave this second skillset behind completely. But I think the debate is more nuanced than IDE = Good or IDE = Bad, 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.
- NoraCodes 7y ago
  > 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 :)
  - joppy 7y ago
    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?
stordoff 7y ago
I liked the approach Cambridge took for computer science (at least while I was there). Practical assessments: * Year 1, term 1: ML, on a Windows machine, using Cambridge ML (for the practicals; the actual course, Foundations of Computer Science, used any Standard ML and recommended Moscow ML) * Year 1, term 2: Java, on a Linux machine[1], using javac; Eclipse was introduced in another course * Year 2, term 1: Further Java, on a Linux machine, using Eclipse, Verilog on a Windows machine with a DE2 Board, MIPS assembler using a soft processor (same board) plus one or both of: * * C/C++, non-compiler specific, no recommended IDE/editor, must run against gcc -std=c99 -Wall --pedantic sourcefile.c or g++ -std=c++98 -Wall --pedantic sourcefile.cc (your choice) with no warnings * * Prolog, on a Linux machine, using SWI-Prolog * Year 2, term 2: Group project - group's choice (we used C on an Arm mBed board in whatever IDE that came with and Java in Eclipse) Everything else (the bulk of the course) was either abstract/theoretical or used you/your supervisors' choice of tools - courses used a varying mix of pseudocode/ML/Java/C where useful, but you didn't necessarily have to use them outside of the lectures and there were no practical exams on these (someone I knew used Haskell for his group project and dissertation, and for testing concepts in supervisions). The idea was to make you comfortable with the fundamentals and moving between technologies, and not be reliant on any particular set of tools. IMO, the contrasting concepts (Windows vs. Linux; functional vs. object-oriented; high-level vs. low-level; hardware vs. software) did this rather successfully. It didn't necessarily get you completely fluent in any particular language (you were largely expected to do this in your own time if it was a direction you wanted to pursue), but it did prepare you for jumping into pretty much any language/environment and getting up to speed quickly. (There were also digital electronics and physics practicals in the first year, but they're a bit of a different thing) [1] It gave you enough bash to run javac and manipulate files. There was a follow-up course the next year that went into a bit more depth on shell, and introduced make/Perl/LaTeX/MATLAB.
hota_mazi 7y ago
> Ultimately, my core belief is this: Students need to know how to use computers before they can program them in a serious way. Nonsense. If we went this way, young people would get completely turned off from programming in the first hours. Show them Python, Javascript, Scratch. Get them to display something on the screen, anything. Get that spark. And once they're hooked, now you can start showing them more details about the wonderful world they have just uncovered. The author of this article needs to spend a solid five more years thinking about computer science and education because right now, her writing is just dangerously naive.
indymike 7y ago
The "stop using IDE _____ so that students can learn how the computer works" has been around since at least Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. In my own career, my toolchain seems to change radically every 3 years, and the transition time is measured in days to weeks. It's not that deep. Neither is bringing a new grad or new hire up to speed on whatever tools we're using. I've worked with enough really good developers who were lost when not given an IDE. Most of the time, it takes a few days to teach "here's how to build at the command line" and here's how to use git (followed by the eventual day lost to finding a way to break git completely). The IDE centrism seems especially common in Windows and Java shops (and every Java shop I've worked with was using Windows).
rukuu001 7y ago
I mean, I get this. I don’t think students should start with Eclipse - it’s a while learning curve on its own. But they should definitely be familiar with it by the time they graduate.
0_gravitas 7y ago
I think a better alternative would be "Don't Make Students Use Java", I seriously can't think of a worse language for training beginner/intermediate programmers, I certainly wish my schooling experience consisted of something else. From day one you're introduced to magic on top of magic: "Open up <IDE> and click 'new project' and name it 'MyProj' and now click on the file in the side menu that says 'MyProj' and inside `public static void main(String args[]){}` inside the `public class MyProj{}` write `System.out.println("Hello World")` and go to the top bar and hit 'Run' and then 'Hello World' will appear in the integrated console, ah, programming!" And you don't even begin to grasp what all those steps you just took in the IDE did until you're at least 1+ years in, and you don't learn what all of those magic words even remotely mean by at least halfway into your second semester. I felt like every single thing I ever did was magic, never having a clue why it ever actually worked the way it did, and as a result nearly dropped out. The only time things _finally_ started to make sense is when I got to Computer Architecture/Organization with MIPS followed by some work in C.
- ardit33 7y ago
  for very beginners, yes... Java is not the right programing language to teach. (I'd say Python is). But for intermediate/advanced classes I think Java is a must learn for every CS graduate. 1. While it is bloated, it has so many modern and not so modern concepts into it, that learning it makes you understand those concepts better. (eg: It is hard to understand Generics if your favorite language doesn't have them) 2. A lot of enterprises (and major tech) backends still run on Java. I thin knowing it is a must to be competitive in the job market as a fresh grad 3. Learning Java (and probably disliking it) it will make you appreciate and perhaps make you better at learning other more nimble languages (aka. GoLang and friends)
  - 0_gravitas 7y ago
    I don't particularly agree with the first two but I can WHOLLY agree on the third, in fact, I think I blame Java for my infatuation with FP
  - shadowCensor 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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kixiQu 7y ago
I'm laughing right now because ... I mean, I really thought this was going to be saying "Don't make students use Eclipse (because it's so inferior to the JetBrains tooling they'll use as professionals". My university had us in the command line plenty for C--that's no reason to pretend that that world has anything to do with how Java is written. It's the same "up by the bootstraps" 70s LARPing fantasy that makes people think that assembly will Teach Computational Thinking Skills that will somehow confer ability to handle distributed systems. If you want students to be able to come out able to effectively use tools, they have to come up using them.
shmerl 7y ago
Start without using any IDE.
Animats 7y ago
"Software Build Processes" is now a field in its own right. There's not just a compiler. There's a build process, a dependency manager, a package manager, a source control system, tools for updating the files those use, etc. It used to be just "make", but now each language has some kind of package management system. Crates, wheels, eggs, containers, boxes inside of boxes - it's complicated. This is all trade-school stuff, really. It's like learning how to wire electric power, with wire size, type, and color rules, fixtures, grounding, and in the US per the National Electrical Code. There's little academic content there; it's just a mass of detail. Not too hard if it's written down and the documentation is current. Which it won't be at many companies. An argument against teaching the details in college is that students will need to know the one they're using in great detail. Knowledge about unrelated build systems doesn't transfer much. Then there's the machine learning parallel universe, with notebooks and YAML.
- NoraCodes 7y ago
  I basically agree with this. This is why, at the end of the post, I recommend Python in a Ubuntu environment, where the "build process" is a single step (`python my_program.py`), and packages can generally be managed with `apt`, which is a standard tool representative of a large class of tools, which are likely to be used at some point by a large fraction of CS students.
  - juped 7y ago
    I think Python builds have gotten nearly as confusing as Java builds (judging by how every Python project these days wants me to use virtualenv).
    - Animats 7y ago
      Yes, virtualenv. A few years ago, I said that "version pinning" was not going to end well, because it would reduce the pressure on library developers to maintain backwards compatibility. Now something equivalent to version pinning is everywhere. Moving forward is tough when, three levels down, some package wants an obsolete version of some other package.
29athrowaway 7y ago
Java might not be the best first language to learn, but if you can't grasp Java as a college student, you won't survive the winter as a professional programmer.
Too 7y ago
Strongly disagree about the IDE part. At so many places I've been it's been the complete opposite problem. Most developers are using notepad++, or at best vscode without any plugins or custom config. When you ask them to put a breakpoint somewhere you get a puzzled look back: "what's a breakpoint?". They don't even know that debuggers exist!! Instead they add printf all over the place, recompile and rerun. Mind you these are people whose CV claim 5+ years of experience. It's terribly ineffective. University should teach the fastest way to iterate logic, Being able to pause your code, introspect the data and then step through it slowly line by line is the best way to really understand and learn the theory of what is going on. Autocomplete is also a fantastic inspiration on what else that's possible to do that's not covered in your lab handouts. How to import libraries and configure your build system will come later by necessity and will have changed by the time you start your next project. Knowing that debuggers exist and how to use them is a more general knowledge and it's something you have to be shown first before you miss it, (if Henry Ford asked what people wanted they would have said faster horses). Build systems and compiler flags can also be very challenging and uninspiring to understand before you even know what a linked list is. As someone else said below, after decades of experience i still have problems understanding the intricacies of CLASSPATH, or PYTHONPATH, ask a student to get this right and they'll just blindly copy-paste the first answer from stackoverflow so they can continue their printf-debugging session and finish their assignment before deadline.
oaiey 7y ago
Maybe eclipse is too much IDE. Maybe a advanced editors like VS Code hit the sweet point. The tasks infrastructure there - as bad as it is - will force you to understand details. It also has a terminal. I do not understand the Java bashing. Python is nice, but it is an interpreter, does not compile, link or create executables. It misses so much in the compilation chain that it is neither a good language in the regard of this post. C++ has all, but well, editors are crappy and pointers for a first lesson student are hard.
shean_massey 7y ago
My uni was nothing like this and I appreciate that. First year: every thing is terminal based, vim was taught, Javac was used by hand, as was nasm/ld/gcc. Only in the second year were we moved to netbeans and eclipse.

276 points by NoraCodes 7y ago

I completely agree. IDEs obscure the behavior of tools and languages. It's the last thing a student needs. I've been talking for a while about writing a course that teaches programming in 2 or 3 languages side by side to basically so the opposite of this. The specific quirks of languages or the things they obscure with magic melt away when you look at languages side by side. I wish university would teach in this way.

codysc 7y ago
I carry this thought process over into my current life. When I start with a new technology/language/etc. I try to start barebones command line, text editor. I transition quickly into more visual / abstracting tools, but that first foray into the guts really helps ground me with a better understanding of what's actually happening.
takeda 7y ago
UCLA has a class that does this, you have 10 weeks to learn 5 languages and write a non trivial assignment in each: http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/syllabus.html http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/syllabus.html http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/homework.html http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/homework.html The languages change over the years, but the goal is to have them touch different programming paradigms.
- afarrell 7y ago
  Thats a different argument, and a much stronger one. "Universities should offer a class on comparative programming languages and language tooling." is much different than "Intro-to-programming classes should not have a strongly-recommended IDE"
  - takeda 7y ago
    I was referring to the second part of his post. Also this class is not introduction to programming it is upper division and considered one of tougher classes in terms of workload. The assignments aren't trivial. Take look at them: http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/homework.html http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/homework.html
  - NoraCodes 7y ago
    I actually think that would mostly confuse a lot of new undergrads. Fundamentals first, variety later (but it's definitely important!)
    - afarrell 7y ago
      I agree. The intro class should use whatever IDE & config will most enable them to teach the fundamentals. Understanding the details of packages and javac and other things should be left for a later class which can put them in the context of other languages.
- touisteur 7y ago
  Oh I had a very interesting class in eng. school about programming languages paradigms. About subtle differences between different implementations of the same concept. Ada, C++, Java, C# (could've gone to functional languages but the lesson was painful enough with these 4). Type-erasure, explicit/implicit/partial template instantiation, visibility rules. And then design patterns, in all those languages. How a singleton makes no sense in a language that's not 'full' object and has 'packages' (not the java ones), how GC/RAII/controlled-types change the patterns. It was both a course on 'using language concepts correctly, picking them carefully for a specific need and not 'to avoid writing 3 more lines of code' and also a lesson in 'how can you paint yourself in a corner and prevent yourself from handling the simplest of requirements change'... Very interesting to see how our mind is shaped by the tools we use.
- NoraCodes 7y ago
  My small liberal arts school has this as well. It's a great idea but, at least for me, it was hamstrung by the professors being too reliant on their IDEs.
gundmc 7y ago
I can see the merit of this, but as an anecdotal counterpoint my first programming class was Fortran 77 using gedit (in the late 2000s). The delayed feedback of whitespace and syntax errors at compile time was painful, slowed down my learning process and distracted from the principles we should have been learning.
- NoraCodes 7y ago
  Perhaps the problem is that Fortran 77 is, like Java, not the best introductory programming language?
eternalban 7y ago
University programs exist to prepare workers for the industry, as a general goal. A subset of students are either already hardcore or will become hardcore developers, cum computer scientists. How should a university 'optimize' their pedagogical approach so that all students are maximally rewarded by their education? There is no question in my mind that you are correct, in principle. But I wonder if what you propose would in fact result in higher attrition rates. With the current approach, the majority benefit from an IDE that reduces the 'cognitive surface' of the "programming environment", and for those who prefer or gravitate towards the underlying layers, no one will prevent them from firing up e.g. Vim and maven. That said, yes, don't make students use Eclipse. Make them use IDEA or VS something. /g
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > University programs exist to prepare workers for the industry, as a general goal. I don't think that it's true that the general goal of University of CS programs is to prepare students for the software dev industry.
  - EdwardDiego 7y ago
    It is in my country. We routinely attend jobs fairs put on by their CS departments alongside every other software dev firm, we take on interns in their 2nd CS year, etc. etc. Hell, they're even learning version control (mainly Git, some SVN) in CS degrees now, which was a nice change to see start coming through in the grads we interview. Although we're seeing universities now start offering Engineering degrees in software with a far more "real-world" requirement including mandatory internships and an industry sponsored research project.
    - bmn__ 7y ago
      Don't you have apprenticeships in your country? University programs as I know them prepare the enrolled for a career in science and are typically far removed from concerns of practicability or applicability.
mettamage 7y ago
CS50 looks quite like what you're describing. One learns: - C - Python (+ Flask) - JavaScript - SQL I think this was the order. They learn C the most.
- NoraCodes 7y ago
  That sounds wonderful! A real overview of the programming landscape, and definitely a good start assuming they follow my other points as well. I'd love to take that course.
  - scns 7y ago
    You can do that on edx.org
- JackFr 7y ago
  As someone who started with C and then made a really hard effort to become an expert C programmer, when later in life I was introduced to Smalltalk and Lisp, I was angry that C had warped my brain and I could only think of programming in the context of a physical machine. I feel it would have been much better to go in the opposite direction.

1f60c 7y ago

Suggestion: in the submission title, replace "Eclipse" with "An IDE".

barnaclejive 7y ago
yep.. I came here to read why Eclipse sucks compared to IntelliJ or something. Turns out, he hates _all_ IDEs.
- 1f60c 7y ago
  > he she[0], but yeah. [0]: https://twitter.com/noradotcodes https://twitter.com/noradotcodes
- _ZeD_ 7y ago
  I really need to tell you: Eclipse really rocks against other IDEs

dvt 7y ago

> ... it insulates the student from the javac command line program, and the command line environment itself Such a misguided article. The Java language has (quite literally) nothing to do with `javac`. In fact, there's a lot of other compilers out there. Taking a Java class should not focus on the intricacies and weirdness of Java compiler command line interfaces. It seems pretty amateurish to argue in favor of it. Case in point: back in high school, I learned C++ using a Borland compiler (and I haven't touched `bcc` in the 15 years since then, even though I've written plenty of C++ in the meantime). > ... imports and file naming requirements. These, again, are (compiler) implementation details and should not be part of a generalized Java curriculum. > And of course, mathematics is the foundation of computer science. Stuff like this can be misleading and even though not completely wrong (discrete math, logic, metalogic, mathematical logic are sorta' kinda' similar), it's just wrong enough[1] to lead people astray. [1] https://www.scott-a-s.com/cs-is-not-math/ https://www.scott-a-s.com/cs-is-not-math/

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
agumonkey 7y ago
it's a regular issue, the more layers between the actual tool (JVM) the less you will need to master, but at the same time the first thing you'll learn is to forget how to use javac or any compiler and just import projects configs or let tools infer stuff for you. In my personal case, knowing about classpaths the hard way was my only path to salvation. Otherwise I was blindly tweaking IDEs project configs without any idea what was happening.
Nightshaxx 7y ago
The point of the article is the very concept that the compiler and the Java runtime environment are not the same thing (which an IDE obfuscates to some extent) is what he wants students to learn early on. (And details like that). This leads into a lot of important concepts around how programming languages are seen by the computer.
- dvt 7y ago

smitty1e 7y ago

Related classic rant: "Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? Ruminations on the Psychology and Aesthetics of Coding" http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.htm...

stefan_ 7y ago

If there is one thing that Eclipse doesn't do is insulate anyone. Half of Java Enterprise development involves various concoctions of Eclipse projects. I'm not sure what the difference is between a student learning about Eclipse idiosyncrasies or .DS_STORE files. One topic is as pointless as the other.

pacetherace 7y ago

While I agree with not using very advanced IDEs. It is important to have the means to quickly navigate standard libraries. MSDN gets my vote for that.

ericmcer 7y ago

I like the idea of starting in a browser. It is a more familiar way to get people used to the concept of text controlling behavior. The jump to compilation and executables might still be difficult, but it’s way better than students on their second year who only know how to run their programs by clicking a green triangle.

DrKabab 7y ago

Harvard's CS50 does a great job at this. My first intro to CS was through this course, and I'm grateful I did it this way rather than wait till I was taught in the "broken" way at college.

enhdless 7y ago

I agree that the file system is not emphasized enough anymore, and I've met a fair share of students who struggle with file paths. Also, in the last section: > or UC Berkeley (oh, I’m sorry, “Cal”) A bit off-topic, but as a Berkeley student, I was a bit amused/confused here, what's the sarcasm in the parenthetical about? According to our official branding guidelines[1] both are acceptable, though Cal is mostly used in athletic contexts. [1] pg34-35, https://brand.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Berkeley-Brand-Manual-accessible.pdf https://brand.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Berkel...

NoraCodes 7y ago
> as a Berkeley student, I was a bit amused/confused here, what's the sarcasm in the parenthetical about? Mostly a dig at the UCB faculty and admin, who act like they're better than the rest of the UC. (I'm a UCSD brat.)

bdcravens 7y ago

I tend to agree, but I wonder how many in the "IDE bad" camp would agree that in order to obtain your drivers license, you must pass the drivers test on a manual transmission?

mech422 7y ago
Gotta admit - that appeals to me :-P U.S. drivers licenses are too easy to get as it is... I don't think my sister even had to parallel park on hers.
- lordalch 7y ago
  Since I got my driver's license over a decade ago, I've had to parallel-park less than ten times. I've probably changed a flat tire more often. I think you would find that the vast majority of drivers in the US don't parallel park even once per year. Furthermore, an increasing fraction of new cars can park automatically. The chief value of having a road test, in my mind, is to force most teens to learn to drive in a structured program that introduces rules of the road and safe habits. Parallel parking is rare and not dangerous, so we shouldn't waste the limited hours that teens spend with professional driving educators on it.
  - stordoff 7y ago
    > I think you would find that the vast majority of drivers in the US don't parallel park even once per year. In the UK, I had the exact opposite experience. Immediately after passing my test, I was parallel parking daily, and I've frequently been in situations where parallel parking is the only way to find a parking space. IMO it _would_ have been dangerous had I not learnt how to do it and was confident doing it. I'd have likely have been too distracted thinking about what I'm trying to do rather than paying sufficient attention to my surroundings. I know I was when I was first learning, and I failed my first driving test because I didn't adequately check my surroundings before starting to reverse.
catalogia 7y ago
I don't really care whether or not other people use IDEs, but I lament not learning to drive on a manual transmission.

cutchin 7y ago

I'm not sure I agree much with this. When I first started learning Java I had six or seven years of programming experience and I still found dealing with matters of classpath and javac remarkably complicated. I had things down well enough with the tools I used before, but it all seemed so foreign in the Java world. And to this day I find junior devs struggle with the same things unless they have a maven/gradle project all set up for them. I'm all for folks learning these skills eventually, but in a first-year CS class I'd really rather students worry about the language and general concepts of writing software. Lots of javascript tutorials start off with opening and browser's javascript console and typing out some simple stuff and I don't think people would tell them they need to jump straight into node.js and webpack. All the other intricacies of writing systems will come to them but I find something uniquely wonderful about sitting and writing code, and if we're lucky we'll find students who can have that same experience. I'd rather meet them where they are and talk purely of the language and core concepts, and introduce them to the ugly details as their progress dictates.

afarrell 7y ago
> and general concepts of writing software. Especially if it is their first experience writing code. Until a student learns to tolerate the discomfort of "the machine isn't doing what I want for some inscrutable reason", it makes no sense to throw them into package-management errors.
therealmarv 7y ago
Actually I agree for the Java world here. Thanks to the design of Java and many Java libraries you cannot write a little more complex Java code from your mind. Even importing all this nested OOP libraries is complicated without an IDE. For me Java is really a language which is impossible or too time consuming to master without a good IDE. Working for many years in the python world professionally some people are still amazed that I'm essentially using more or less a normal text editor. IDE is optional for many languages but for some languages it's a strong requirement.
- EdwardDiego 7y ago
  When I was teaching myself to code I started writing Java in Notepad. Not Notepad++, just Notepad. And it was as painful as you'd expect, put me right off Java (most of my learning was in Python), and didn't really teach me much that I now use as a developer in a JVM shop.

afarrell 7y ago

> Most importantly, though, it limits the ability of their peers to learn. If a 300-level software engineering class which budgeted a week to teach basic version control skills has to take a two-day detour to teach the Windows users how to get rid of the CRLFs in their commits, and teach the Mac users to remove the .DS_Store files from their repositories, and get everyone set up in Eclipse EGIT, that’s wasted time. If the professor has to schedule time with students outside of class to demonstrate their code because so many students aren’t able to submit their code in a form that successfully runs on the professor’s computer, that’s wasted time for both professors and students, and it undermines important lessons about portability and good practices. This is might be an argument against a particular IDE setup for a class, but it isn't an argument against IDEs in general. Instead it is an argument for providing a config file to make these problems go away. > When students have only ever programmed in Java using some bespoke learning library provided by their professor, it will take them much longer than necessary to figure out other languages, other libraries, and other approaches. The article doesn't support the case that an intro class using an IDE prevents students from learning anything else. The class doesn't set people back--it merely fails to move them forward in that way. I agree that it is important to teach this eventually. But it should be through teaching it deliberately. (EDIT: Someone else posted a link to a class which compares different languages and their tooling side-by-side. That sounds fantastic.) I have yet to see a class which can do a good job of teaching how package management works to a degree that the student can then confidently debug weird setuptools errors. I've been looking for such a class since 2009.

The_rationalist 7y ago

Defering learning of implementation details is virtuous and on the plus side, intellij IDEs have state of the art static analysis that show to the coder anti patterns and help it rewrite them in a cleaner way, and with an explanation. Autocompletion and integrated documentation do increase discoverability and learning of the language, not the reverse. BTW intellij has launched an IDE specialized for teaching: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2019/10/intellij-idea-edu-eap/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2019/10/intellij-idea-edu-ea...

Havoc 7y ago

Yeah I found Eclipse a pain to set up for python the first time I tried. Kept throwing weird Java errors and GUI glitches. Abandoned that plan very fast

erdos4d 7y ago

Wait, I shouldn't make students learn the tool they will be forced to use when they get a job? Um, no.

nullc 7y ago
People who learn the tool alone are substantially unhireable. When you hire a developer you usually need them to also be at least be something of an expert computer user, especially if they're going to be working on a small team without 20 other experts to micromanage them. Over-reliance on the IDEs leaves people appliance operators that are lost when there isn't a magic button to press. It isn't just an issue in the job market. "Programmers" who aren't sufficiently advanced computer users can't advance their own projects in academia either-- they're stuck working on precooked assignments. I suspect this is one of the forces that has resulted in academic research being utterly starved for competent software engineering (though the main one remains that competent software engineers can get stable high paying jobs, and academia provides them with neither).
oreally 7y ago
Always good to get students to dig deeper, even if it's for their initial 1st/2nd semester, and especially if they're going to be programming long term. But ofc let them have the freedom to choose afterwards.

msingh_5 7y ago

I guess the sentiment is more like "Don't make students start programming in IDEs first" I get it. It shields them from understanding what's happening underneath. But not everybody is interested or needs to know all the things happening underneath, and its okay. If they're going to learn the whole stack, they will.

afarrell 7y ago
Even for someone who is interested in knowing what happens underneath. To succeed at actions, it important not to expand the scope of what you're trying to do too broadly.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y ago

The music analogy here would be: We'd like you to learn the C major scale, but first, please become familiar with Pro Tools.

dacracot 7y ago

I agree, and it has been going on for a very long time. I have coworkers who's productivity (if you can call it that) would slide to zero if you took away Eclipse. If it isn't implemented in an Eclipse plugin, well forget it. Setting up the deployment environment is so far outside of their capability as to be a joke. And these people have been out of college for over a decade.

jimbob45 7y ago

This can fuck right off. My elitist university decided that if it wasn’t pure C built on a Linux box, then it wasn’t worth using. Consequently, I never learned how much more enjoyable and quick programming could be until I used VS at my first job. Even worse, I was a VS novice, struggling to perform even the most rudimentary of debugging techniques, despite being fairly fluent in GDB/Valgrind.

qppo 7y ago
I had the opposite experience. My university decided that they would standardize student development environments on vanilla Visual Studio, put everything that students would ever want into a single header (i swear it was something like "header.h") that you copy/pasted into your project folder and that was it. We didn't even use the terminal. It was tedious as hell to learn everything else in real world development, like static versus dynamic linking, include/linker paths, make, system libraries, and so on. Like as in myself nor my classmates would have any idea those things existed after two semesters of C++ programming courses. The moral here is that education needs a degree of breadth. Teaching CS students involves three concepts - Computer Science, Writing Code, and Writing Software. The dependency graph between those topics on what knowledge and tools are needed contains cycles.
NoraCodes 7y ago
I'm sorry you had that experience, but you'll note that this isn't what I'm actually suggesting; my suggestion is Python or another dynamic language on any platform so long as it's standardized and accessible, for which I give the example of Ubuntu, but I also mention that Windows with Powershell is an option.

gwbas1c 7y ago

> What they can’t do, unless they’ve figured it out on their own, is operate a computer outside of the confines of the IDE they’ve been taught. Understanding what a file is and what a text editor should be prerequisites for entering a computer science department. Someone who doesn't understand these concepts has no business learning to program. At my "not MIT" school, it was expected that most incoming CS students understood some basic programming before they entered school. A CD department that tolerates students who don't know what a file is probably has other problems.

SaxonRobber 7y ago
That excludes a huge number of students who will have never had the experience to try programming before university. I never did any programming before my first year, I was planning on going into economics. But then I took an elective in CS and it became my major. I wasn’t alone either, most of the students were not programmers previously.
augustt 7y ago
At actual MIT there are no expectations like this.
stordoff 7y ago
> At my "not MIT" school, it was expected that most incoming CS students understood some basic programming before they entered school. At Cambridge (UK), this is _not_ the case. They merely note that "some knowledge of procedural programming is useful"[1] and "[n]o prior knowledge of programming is required"[2]. The main thing they are looking for, in terms of qualifications, is mathematics, so you'd typically see an A-level in mathematics plus two further ones in further mathematics, the physical sciences, or computing depending on what your school offers. At interview (for two colleges), I was not asked about programming - the first was purely mathematics based, and the second was primarily maths based with some CS concepts introduced to see how you thought about and were able to manipulate the information given in the interview. It's not something you were necessarily expected to know. Until this year, the introductory CS modules (making up 25% of the first year's content) were available to natural sciences students, so you would have students from a fairly wide range of backgrounds _successfully_ learning CS and to program (the maths modules, also making up 25%, are still shared, for what it's worth). [1] https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/entry https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/entry [2] https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/computer-science https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/computer-s...

pbhjpbhj 7y ago

>Using Java or Python in a professional IDE like IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans, PyCharm, or Eclipse is not a good first introduction to programming for computer science students, whether they’re in the field to become web developers, systems software engineers, or academic computer science researchers. // So "for computer science students". Which seems like too major a thing to miss out of the title. Also, how does webdev fit in here: seems like webdevs should probably be using IDEs from lesson 2. And I say that as someone who started their web content production path writing HTML in pico.

ashton314 7y ago

The author brings this up as a reason for using an IDE: > This is valuable in an introductory course, as it avoids wasting class time and lowers the barrier to entry and then proceeds to argue why other things are more important than that. I don't like Eclipse or other IDEs, having watched my fellow students get stymied by basic issues that I could resolve with one or two relatively simple instructions on the command line. I think IDEs can be a crutch that programmers ought to learn to do without. Learning what the "real" tools are will pay dividends—quickly too. That being said, I think it's important that the barrier to entry be low. Java almost necessitates the use of an IDE. There's so much "enterprise" cruft involved in doing the simplest things that, unless you have an IDE to hide it, you're going to confuse beginners. A better choice of language and tooling can help here. I think starting off with something like Racket would be best. Those who need an IDE (out of laziness, familiarity, whatever) can use DrRacket, and then switch to running their programs from the command line shortly thereafter with next to no transition overhead.

dionian 7y ago
i agree with everyone saying you shouldnt use IDE as a crutch.. but as a seasoned Java dev, it is probably my main exception to the rule as well. I would just recommend intellij over eclipse for beginners, but its better than nothing.

uk_programmer 7y ago

I agree with sentiment of this. I meet a lot of developers that cannot function outside of the IDE (in my case Visual Studio). As a consequence they struggle when the IDE fails.

pkamb 7y ago

"public static void main string bracket bracket args" "public static void main string bracket bracket args" "public static void main string bracket bracket args" kind of sad that my first exposure to programming of any kind at University was just repeating that mantra.

saagarjha 7y ago
Wait until you learn that you can use public static void main(String... args) ;)
- pkamb 7y ago
  I gave up Java immediately after that class!
bori5 7y ago
You missed two parentheses

lxe 7y ago

> The issue is, as Kevlin Henney is fond of saying, “Software is nothing but the details.” When students don’t understand what a file is, or haven’t ever edited text in anything but Microsoft Word and don’t realize they can edit code outside of an IDE3, they will not be able to do the crucial work of self-directed learning that is a hallmark of all computer science success. Not sure why the aggressive comments here, but I agree with this. IDE for learning programming ends up shielding you from reality that you should probably understand before you use an IDE.

ativzzz 7y ago
People who don't know what a file is need to take a computer literacy class before they can jump into something like programming. An IDE is fine to hide programming related magic for a beginner, but if it needs to hide things like a filesystem, file extensions, navigating through advanced options in simple software like word and internet browsers, or how to use google to help diagnose technical issues, that person is in way over their heads.

sumukh1 7y ago

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about this while helping build software & TA'ing for Berkeley's introductory course (which uses Python & Scheme) and I largely agree with the author. If you're wondering why the author ignores large schools, it's because they have the resources to invest in this. Here's a sample of the things the efforts that Berkeley did for their introductory course [1] * Online tools to run & visualize code execution directly from the online textbook (ex: https://composingprograms.com/pages/16-higher-order-functions.html#functions-as-returned-values https://composingprograms.com/pages/16-higher-order-function...) * Easy submission for students (no git in CS1, no scp, no printing) * Instructor autograding for all assignments so the course staff could focus on reviewing code for style/other components. * Automatically backing up student code * In some assignments, there were automated hints for syntax, styling, and even correctness [2, 3] * Online collaborative editing for partner assignments [4] * Full time staff allocated to building teaching infrastructure to "reduce accidental complexities when using code to solve problems" * Completely hosted environments (via Jupyter Notebooks or Scratch) for courses with a lot of non-majors. [1] https://cs61a.org https://cs61a.org [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3059009.3059058 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3059009.3059058 [3] https://okpy.org/about/publications/ https://okpy.org/about/publications/ [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=polTBnMXGQI&rel=0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=polTBnMXGQI&rel=0

BeetleB 7y ago

In the introductory classes I took, there was no IDE. We telnet into a server, and were taught Pico as an editor (although you were free to use vi or emacs if you wanted). You compiled using g++. You did everything via the command line. Most of the problems the author is pointing out existed there as well. The author is misguided in assuming that IDE's are the cause.

jcrawfordor 7y ago

I can't help but feel like this article is less a condemnation of IDEs in introductory teaching and more a condemnation of java in introductory teaching. It feels like the use of Eclipse or IntelliJ in intro CS courses is so common in large part because Java has such relatively complex tooling and language conventions. I've never seen someone intro Python with an IDE, because it's extremely easy to use Python without one. The same goes for C, and indeed all of the intro C classes I've seen have gone without an IDE. Java, though... you really could spend an extended part of the course just getting everyone setting up their first file and using the compiler correctly, if it's the first language.

vips7L 7y ago
I don't see how java tooling is any more complex than any other language, they all have learning curves. Even Python has complexities around venv, requirements, pipfile etc. C's tooling in particular is probably the worst. You have to learn the compiler, the linker, or a 3rd party tool like cmake or meson. Using an IDE in Java is a choice just like picking PyCharm is for python.
- NoraCodes 7y ago
  I agree with you in general, but here I am discussing introductory CS programs. It's very hard for an intro CS student to build and run a Java program without an IDE, even with help from the professor. It's completely trivial for that same student to write and run most of the Python programs they'll be doing in their intro class after having installed _just Python_.
- jcrawfordor 7y ago
  I feel like this kind of makes the point though... while all of this tooling does exist for Python, it's very easy to use Python without any of it at all. So it can be relegated to more of an advanced, 'production-ready' topic, e.g. in a software engineering course. Indeed, I've never seen an intro course in either Python or C that touches on any of this tooling, save one professor who distributed a standard makefile for his intro C course - but I'm honestly not sure why. It usually suffices just fine to have the students call gcc themselves, the projects they work on in the first year aren't big enough to make this cumbersome. While that's partially true of Java, it's less true of Java. More of the tooling around Java is de facto required.

jbverschoor 7y ago

Actually.. for the basic basics it's fine to do let them use a text editor and compiler. But after like 2 files, it's easier to learn the language due to autocomplete and errorchecking. The whole compilation / dependency stack, well I don't think that's the issue here.

zmmmmm 7y ago

I thought this was going to be the standard Eclipse bashing and then found it was more fundamental than that. In many ways Eclipse is one of the less problematic IDEs because it does expose a lot of the underlying warts... it's one of the reasons people dislike it (among others, to be clear - memory usage, less fluid ergonmics in many other ways). But one of the reasons I have stuck with it is that, like when you understand Git at a fundamental level it all "makes sense", Eclipse has a better direct relationship to the underlying mechanics than other IDEs I've used.

nunez 7y ago

Truth. I work with plenty of engineers that have only written Java with Eclipse or Jetbrains. Many have a lot of trouble getting their app to compile locally when asked to do so upon moving the app into containers. Many also had issues even writing software upon trying to use something like Vi or VSCode. At some point, the training wheels need to come off.

lonelappde 7y ago

This article is a confused mess with no point. Sure it would be nice to teach students everything at first. But that's obviously impossible.

mr_toad 7y ago
People often forget how few hours go into a typical university paper. It’s not unlikely that a programmer with a full-time job could put in more hours in just one month than a student would for an entire introduction to programming paper. It’s unrealistic to expect to be able to cover all aspects of programming in such a short time.

bcruddy 7y ago

I feel like people upvoted this because it said don't use eclipse but didn't read the article. Now I'm questioning my sanity - given a choice, do professional developers choose to use eclipse? The question is somewhat loaded given the previous statement based on my own biases but I've never written java professionally so excuse my ignorance.

vips7L 7y ago
Most java devs use intellij. But the eclipse language server powers the vs-code plugin for java. It's quite good and it's what I use personally.
- bcruddy 7y ago
  Totally makes sense as a plugin - I love vscode for both golang and javascript. The IDE itself seems clunky but I'm not against IDEs themselves.
blendo 7y ago
Eclipse seems to have carved out a popular niche in the field of embedded C and C++. (JetBrains, please take note.)

Guest42 7y ago

In my academic experience netbeans was used and it seemed to simplify things.

rschulman 7y ago

My first year CS classes went by SCIP and were taught in scheme. Of course, I went to a place that didn't much distinguish between comp sci and comp eng, so what do I know?

ineedasername 7y ago

Honestly I wasn't aware that current curriculums used any sort of advanced IDE's. When I took courses in the late 90's & early 00's, from assembly, c++, java and python the focus was on minimal text editors and command line compile, link etc. Though for python, Idle was promoted, but that's pretty bare bones relatively speaking. I wasn't aware that a shift away from basics had occurred.

thewebcount 7y ago

> First, in a Java-focused curriculum, it insulates the student from the javac command line program, and the command line environment itself. I take exception to this line of thinking. Students should not be using the command line for programming. I believe that forcing students to learn to use command line tools is the reason why so much software has such horrible user experience. They learn that users don't matter unless they've steeped themselves in the arcana of each particular program and have practically become programmers themselves. > Second, it catches some basic mistakes and allows the student to defer learning about the finnicky language requirements that aren’t deemed core to the curriculum, like imports and file naming requirements. I had the exact opposite experience. At university, they sat us down at a Unix shell with almost no instruction on the shell or the compiler. We spent so much time learning the finicky shell requirements (and which we had no clear understanding were part of the shell and not the compiler itself or something else), that we were sidelined from understanding what the compiler was telling us or how it worked. You'd run your program and if it gave you an error 11, well, you just read and re-read it until you noticed something off. Nowadays with an IDE and a static analyzer, it can show my code and show the exact path of execution that will lead to an invalid memory access before I've even run it. Students can learn to find problems themselves because it's laid out right in front of their eyes in relatively-understandable java or C or whatever language they're programming in. They don't need to worry about, "Oh when I compile on this machine, I have to specify the -I argument to the compiler for includes, but on machines I actually use in real life, I don't have to specify anything because it finds all the files I'm actually using because I put them into the IDE myself and can see their relationships." > it’s crucial to introduce these inconvenient details eventually. Why? If I'm going to be downloading my IDE from the Internet or an App Store why the heck should I ever learn fiddly Unix commands? I'm writing GUI-based applications. I don't need to understand any of that crap if I don't want to. It's like saying you can't be a taxi driver if you don't understand how the carburetor works. Really? My job is to drive the car around, not to fix it. I know a good mechanic who can do that if the need arises. If they want to learn it, then all the better, but it shouldn't be a requirement. > What they can’t do, unless they’ve figured it out on their own, is operate a computer outside of the confines of the IDE they’ve been taught. On the contrary, I had no problem operating the GUI-based computers of my day. It was the bizarre, often contradictory commands in the Unix shell that baffled me. Their names were often stupid puns, their "help" pages did no such thing, and I wasted years learning a bunch of stuff that ended up not being very helpful in the real world. > When students have only ever programmed in Java using some bespoke learning library provided by their professor, it will take them much longer than necessary to figure out other languages, other libraries, and other approaches. That has nothing to do with IDEs. That has to do with a deficient teaching environment, and is the exact same problem I described above, which sounds like what the author is advocating. > Teaching someone to use git is very difficult if they’ve never been taught that a file is an logical unit composed of bytes and metadata. No, teaching someone to use git is very difficult because it was designed to be difficult because the self-absorbed creator thinks that people should have to suffer to become good programmers. It's just sadistic. > Students need to know how to use computers before they can program them in a serious way. I agree, and what the author is proposing sounds like the opposite of that to me. > After the first foray into programming, take time to teach students about the UNIX command line. Ugh. I disagree strongly with this sentiment. CS students need to get away from the mentality that Unix is the be-all-end-all of operating systems and programming environments and the quicker that happens the better in my opinion.

yters 7y ago

I like Eclipse, but now that I know my way about, it's much easier to knock out a small Java problem on the command line than to fire up Eclipse, setup a project, etc. Then there's all the magical metadata and whatnot that can get screwed up. Much less mental overhead and less things to worry about on the Linux command line. Plus, I can do more with the commandline tools. I think students in general will be more versatile if they start with the command line, and then graduate to Eclipse. That way, they'll realize what they lose and gain in an IDE.

cordite 7y ago

I used to do C, C++, Haskell, and php in sublime when I was a student. But I greatly disagree about students using IDEs on languages like Java. Getting familiar with debuggers, stepping around, that's absolutely a necessary skill--unless you want to go into stdio, or echo based debugging (which is what I'd do with the languages above).

joppy 7y ago

I think that this is mixing up two different skills. The first skill is learning to program, and in particular learning to program data structures, or algorithms, or whatever. For this you don't care at all how your code builds, you care about correctness and easy to use testing infrastructure, and an IDE like IntelliJ or Eclipse is going to be almost frictionless for that. Teaching command line necessities together with this provides nothing of value for this skill. If I'm trying to get an algorithm right, I don't care at all about how my code builds, I care that it is easy to hit the "recompile and run tests" button. I also think that Java is a decent choice of language for this. The second skill is learning how to build, version control, package and distribute software, and for this you really need to learn the common tools used in the industry. Which in addition to the IDE, is use of the Unix/Windows command line, git, compilers, Makefiles and build systems, and so on. Here you really need to care about the details - for example, such a project could be to take a previous project and package it so that it runs on a computer without Java/Python/etc installed. I think the problem is that many universities never have a course on this second skillset, and so while for teaching the first skillset they choose appropriate tools (in my opinion), they leave this second skillset behind completely. But I think the debate is more nuanced than IDE = Good or IDE = Bad, 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.

NoraCodes 7y ago
> 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 :)
- joppy 7y ago
  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?

stordoff 7y ago

I liked the approach Cambridge took for computer science (at least while I was there). Practical assessments: * Year 1, term 1: ML, on a Windows machine, using Cambridge ML (for the practicals; the actual course, Foundations of Computer Science, used any Standard ML and recommended Moscow ML) * Year 1, term 2: Java, on a Linux machine[1], using javac; Eclipse was introduced in another course * Year 2, term 1: Further Java, on a Linux machine, using Eclipse, Verilog on a Windows machine with a DE2 Board, MIPS assembler using a soft processor (same board) plus one or both of: * * C/C++, non-compiler specific, no recommended IDE/editor, must run against gcc -std=c99 -Wall --pedantic sourcefile.c or g++ -std=c++98 -Wall --pedantic sourcefile.cc (your choice) with no warnings * * Prolog, on a Linux machine, using SWI-Prolog * Year 2, term 2: Group project - group's choice (we used C on an Arm mBed board in whatever IDE that came with and Java in Eclipse) Everything else (the bulk of the course) was either abstract/theoretical or used you/your supervisors' choice of tools - courses used a varying mix of pseudocode/ML/Java/C where useful, but you didn't necessarily have to use them outside of the lectures and there were no practical exams on these (someone I knew used Haskell for his group project and dissertation, and for testing concepts in supervisions). The idea was to make you comfortable with the fundamentals and moving between technologies, and not be reliant on any particular set of tools. IMO, the contrasting concepts (Windows vs. Linux; functional vs. object-oriented; high-level vs. low-level; hardware vs. software) did this rather successfully. It didn't necessarily get you completely fluent in any particular language (you were largely expected to do this in your own time if it was a direction you wanted to pursue), but it did prepare you for jumping into pretty much any language/environment and getting up to speed quickly. (There were also digital electronics and physics practicals in the first year, but they're a bit of a different thing) [1] It gave you enough bash to run javac and manipulate files. There was a follow-up course the next year that went into a bit more depth on shell, and introduced make/Perl/LaTeX/MATLAB.

hota_mazi 7y ago

> Ultimately, my core belief is this: Students need to know how to use computers before they can program them in a serious way. Nonsense. If we went this way, young people would get completely turned off from programming in the first hours. Show them Python, Javascript, Scratch. Get them to display something on the screen, anything. Get that spark. And once they're hooked, now you can start showing them more details about the wonderful world they have just uncovered. The author of this article needs to spend a solid five more years thinking about computer science and education because right now, her writing is just dangerously naive.

indymike 7y ago

The "stop using IDE _____ so that students can learn how the computer works" has been around since at least Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. In my own career, my toolchain seems to change radically every 3 years, and the transition time is measured in days to weeks. It's not that deep. Neither is bringing a new grad or new hire up to speed on whatever tools we're using. I've worked with enough really good developers who were lost when not given an IDE. Most of the time, it takes a few days to teach "here's how to build at the command line" and here's how to use git (followed by the eventual day lost to finding a way to break git completely). The IDE centrism seems especially common in Windows and Java shops (and every Java shop I've worked with was using Windows).

rukuu001 7y ago

I mean, I get this. I don’t think students should start with Eclipse - it’s a while learning curve on its own. But they should definitely be familiar with it by the time they graduate.

0_gravitas 7y ago

I think a better alternative would be "Don't Make Students Use Java", I seriously can't think of a worse language for training beginner/intermediate programmers, I certainly wish my schooling experience consisted of something else. From day one you're introduced to magic on top of magic: "Open up <IDE> and click 'new project' and name it 'MyProj' and now click on the file in the side menu that says 'MyProj' and inside `public static void main(String args[]){}` inside the `public class MyProj{}` write `System.out.println("Hello World")` and go to the top bar and hit 'Run' and then 'Hello World' will appear in the integrated console, ah, programming!" And you don't even begin to grasp what all those steps you just took in the IDE did until you're at least 1+ years in, and you don't learn what all of those magic words even remotely mean by at least halfway into your second semester. I felt like every single thing I ever did was magic, never having a clue why it ever actually worked the way it did, and as a result nearly dropped out. The only time things _finally_ started to make sense is when I got to Computer Architecture/Organization with MIPS followed by some work in C.

ardit33 7y ago
for very beginners, yes... Java is not the right programing language to teach. (I'd say Python is). But for intermediate/advanced classes I think Java is a must learn for every CS graduate. 1. While it is bloated, it has so many modern and not so modern concepts into it, that learning it makes you understand those concepts better. (eg: It is hard to understand Generics if your favorite language doesn't have them) 2. A lot of enterprises (and major tech) backends still run on Java. I thin knowing it is a must to be competitive in the job market as a fresh grad 3. Learning Java (and probably disliking it) it will make you appreciate and perhaps make you better at learning other more nimble languages (aka. GoLang and friends)
- 0_gravitas 7y ago
  I don't particularly agree with the first two but I can WHOLLY agree on the third, in fact, I think I blame Java for my infatuation with FP
- shadowCensor 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

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kixiQu 7y ago

I'm laughing right now because ... I mean, I really thought this was going to be saying "Don't make students use Eclipse (because it's so inferior to the JetBrains tooling they'll use as professionals". My university had us in the command line plenty for C--that's no reason to pretend that that world has anything to do with how Java is written. It's the same "up by the bootstraps" 70s LARPing fantasy that makes people think that assembly will Teach Computational Thinking Skills that will somehow confer ability to handle distributed systems. If you want students to be able to come out able to effectively use tools, they have to come up using them.

shmerl 7y ago

Start without using any IDE.

Animats 7y ago

"Software Build Processes" is now a field in its own right. There's not just a compiler. There's a build process, a dependency manager, a package manager, a source control system, tools for updating the files those use, etc. It used to be just "make", but now each language has some kind of package management system. Crates, wheels, eggs, containers, boxes inside of boxes - it's complicated. This is all trade-school stuff, really. It's like learning how to wire electric power, with wire size, type, and color rules, fixtures, grounding, and in the US per the National Electrical Code. There's little academic content there; it's just a mass of detail. Not too hard if it's written down and the documentation is current. Which it won't be at many companies. An argument against teaching the details in college is that students will need to know the one they're using in great detail. Knowledge about unrelated build systems doesn't transfer much. Then there's the machine learning parallel universe, with notebooks and YAML.

NoraCodes 7y ago
I basically agree with this. This is why, at the end of the post, I recommend Python in a Ubuntu environment, where the "build process" is a single step (`python my_program.py`), and packages can generally be managed with `apt`, which is a standard tool representative of a large class of tools, which are likely to be used at some point by a large fraction of CS students.
- juped 7y ago
  I think Python builds have gotten nearly as confusing as Java builds (judging by how every Python project these days wants me to use virtualenv).
  - Animats 7y ago
    Yes, virtualenv. A few years ago, I said that "version pinning" was not going to end well, because it would reduce the pressure on library developers to maintain backwards compatibility. Now something equivalent to version pinning is everywhere. Moving forward is tough when, three levels down, some package wants an obsolete version of some other package.

29athrowaway 7y ago

Java might not be the best first language to learn, but if you can't grasp Java as a college student, you won't survive the winter as a professional programmer.

Too 7y ago

Strongly disagree about the IDE part. At so many places I've been it's been the complete opposite problem. Most developers are using notepad++, or at best vscode without any plugins or custom config. When you ask them to put a breakpoint somewhere you get a puzzled look back: "what's a breakpoint?". They don't even know that debuggers exist!! Instead they add printf all over the place, recompile and rerun. Mind you these are people whose CV claim 5+ years of experience. It's terribly ineffective. University should teach the fastest way to iterate logic, Being able to pause your code, introspect the data and then step through it slowly line by line is the best way to really understand and learn the theory of what is going on. Autocomplete is also a fantastic inspiration on what else that's possible to do that's not covered in your lab handouts. How to import libraries and configure your build system will come later by necessity and will have changed by the time you start your next project. Knowing that debuggers exist and how to use them is a more general knowledge and it's something you have to be shown first before you miss it, (if Henry Ford asked what people wanted they would have said faster horses). Build systems and compiler flags can also be very challenging and uninspiring to understand before you even know what a linked list is. As someone else said below, after decades of experience i still have problems understanding the intricacies of CLASSPATH, or PYTHONPATH, ask a student to get this right and they'll just blindly copy-paste the first answer from stackoverflow so they can continue their printf-debugging session and finish their assignment before deadline.

oaiey 7y ago

Maybe eclipse is too much IDE. Maybe a advanced editors like VS Code hit the sweet point. The tasks infrastructure there - as bad as it is - will force you to understand details. It also has a terminal. I do not understand the Java bashing. Python is nice, but it is an interpreter, does not compile, link or create executables. It misses so much in the compilation chain that it is neither a good language in the regard of this post. C++ has all, but well, editors are crappy and pointers for a first lesson student are hard.

shean_massey 7y ago

My uni was nothing like this and I appreciate that. First year: every thing is terminal based, vim was taught, Javac was used by hand, as was nasm/ld/gcc. Only in the second year were we moved to netbeans and eclipse.