The author appears to be a purist. While I respect the position, I'm a pragmatist and respectfully disagree. Also the title seems misleading. It should probably

The author appears to be a purist. While I respect the position, I'm a pragmatist and respectfully disagree. Also the title seems misleading. It should probably be "Stop making students use IDE". Schools' job should be to teach how to learn in my opinion. Back when I was in university, I was taught a lot of things too and some of it were fundamentals thus necessary. Others could have been cut out for more discovery based learning. I "learned" Java after many other languages (C, C++, Perl, C#, Python, JS, etc). I've used Eclipse and NetBeans but I feel IntelliJ is special. It has a great feedback mechanism that teaches the language too as a side effect. Dealing with the command line to compile code does teach a few things but after a short while it's just busy work imo. Learning imports? Sure, but again, not having to spend much time in mechanics means one can spend more time on more exciting aspects like refactoring. It all depends on what the teaching focuses on after allowing or disallowing the use of IDE.