I disagree but from a different angle than the other person: IME a major barrier to students being able to complete assignments was basic mastery of syntax. Now

I disagree but from a different angle than the other person: IME a major barrier to students being able to complete assignments was basic mastery of syntax. Now, you might think, but of course, they're students. But I saw this as the main barrier at ALL levels and in all classes. People who could understand algorithms and linear algebra being unable to write a counting for loop that iterates over an array without looking it up and carefully copy pasting it. There's just an innate familiarity with the text of your program and how it translates to an AST that you MUST command. And having tools that can "did you mean" auto-fix things doesn't help, especially with imports, when almost languages have non-trivial import systems. I obviously encourage teaching modern IDEs but I think we would do students a disservice if we didn't make them use a fairly plain text editor for most learning. I started with BlueJ which provided a "compile" button and syntax highlighting and that was about it, and I was then later (after having stopped using bluej of course) confused by people who were using eclipse but couldn't get their imports working right. Maybe that's my main point actually: none of these tools are good enough that they let you actually not understand the underlying system. They're just time-savers/auto-completes, which can confuse newbies.