Wait, I shouldn't make students learn the tool they will be forced to use when they get a job? Um, no.
Don't Make Students Use Eclipse
21–30 of 255 posts
Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse
#22I 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.
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/homework.html The languages change over the years, but the goal is to have them touch different programming paradigms.
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"
Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse
#23I 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.
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
Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse
#24I 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.
Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse
#25I'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 projec…
> 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.
Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse
#26I 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.
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.
Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse
#27I 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.
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.
Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse
#28The music analogy here would be: We'd like you to learn the C major scale, but first, please become familiar with Pro Tools.
Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse
#29I 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.
Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse
#30This 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.