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Eclipse is poor tooling for teaching. Far too many buttons and noise that gets in the way. But the opposite, programming with no debugger and no linter is just
by devwastaken 5y ago
Eclipse is poor tooling for teaching. Far too many buttons and noise that gets in the way. But the opposite, programming with no debugger and no linter is just as bad. It punishes you for getting the smallest syntax mistakes by waiting for the compiler and reading out erroneous messages.
A debugger makes it far better to understand the execution of code line by line, and should be standard in education, but it's not.
I feel that visual studio code, with some modifications, would be perfect to begin with. Then when building things at a higher level, introduce why to use eclipse, like how it handles packages, etc.
- convolutionart 5y agoWhat kind of modifications?
- bodhiandphysics 5y agoTo be fair I’m taking an assembly course right now, a massive component of which is learning (command line!) gcc...
- userbinator 5y agoA debugger makes it far better to understand the execution of code line by line, and should be standard in education, but it's not In practice, from what I've seen teaching programming (not using Eclipse nor Java), this tends to cause "debugging tunnel-vision" instead, where someone will just keep stepping through code that has a problem, and not even know what happened until the wrong result was seen.
- cerved 5y agoLiterally the second paragraph is about an alternative Java IDE suitable for teaching introductory programming