Personally, I'm against making students use Eclipse because it's a terrible IDE and this constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Seriously though, I have tro

Personally, I'm against making students use Eclipse because it's a terrible IDE and this constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Seriously though, I have trouble following the author's argument here. For example, she points out that details like the Windows filesystem being case-insensitive are hidden. Well, that's true if you use an IDE or not. And how does not using an IDE expose you to that? Also, what 300 level software engineering course is taking time out to teach you how to use an IDE? Is my experience abnormal? I can remember showing up to second year and being told "we're using C now, here's an 8 page pamphlet about how that works" and that was it. I'm all for not making learning programming arbitrarily more difficult in the beginning as that's how you lose people. Having done things is not a badge of honor. In fact, encouraging this kind of gatekeeping as acceptable is (IMHO) far more harmful.