Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

Actually I agree for the Java world here. Thanks to the design of Java and many Java libraries you cannot write a little more complex Java code from your mind. Even importing all this nested OOP libraries is complicated without an IDE. For me Java is really a language which is impossible or too time consuming to master without a good IDE.

Working for many years in the python world professionally some people are still amazed that I'm essentially using more or less a normal text editor. IDE is optional for many languages but for some languages it's a strong requirement.

People who learn the tool alone are substantially unhireable.

When you hire a developer you usually need them to also be at least be something of an expert computer user, especially if they're going to be working on a small team without 20 other experts to micromanage them.

Over-reliance on the IDEs leaves people appliance operators that are lost when there isn't a magic button to press.

It isn't just an issue in the job market. "Programmers" who aren't sufficiently advanced computer users can't advance their own projects in academia either-- they're stuck working on precooked assignments. I suspect this is one of the forces that has resulted in academic research being utterly starved for competent software engineering (though the main one remains that competent software engineers can get stable high paying jobs, and academia provides them with neither).

> What they can’t do, unless they’ve figured it out on their own, is operate a computer outside of the confines of the IDE they’ve been taught.

Understanding what a file is and what a text editor should be prerequisites for entering a computer science department. Someone who doesn't understand these concepts has no business learning to program.

At my "not MIT" school, it was expected that most incoming CS students understood some basic programming before they entered school.

A CD department that tolerates students who don't know what a file is probably has other problems.

> ... how programming languages are seen by the computer

Learning a programming language has nothing to do with how it's seen by a computer. That's a different class (a class on compilers, maybe). You can even turn Java into Javascript if you want to[1]. The fact that the compilation/transpilation flow here is Java -> Java Bytecode -> JS is meaningless in the context of learning Java.

[1] https://github.com/google/j2cl

The author brings this up as a reason for using an IDE:

> This is valuable in an introductory course, as it avoids wasting class time and lowers the barrier to entry

and then proceeds to argue why other things are more important than that.

I don't like Eclipse or other IDEs, having watched my fellow students get stymied by basic issues that I could resolve with one or two relatively simple instructions on the command line. I think IDEs can be a crutch that programmers ought to learn to do without. Learning what the "real" tools are will pay dividends—quickly too.

That being said, I think it's important that the barrier to entry be low. Java almost necessitates the use of an IDE. There's so much "enterprise" cruft involved in doing the simplest things that, unless you have an IDE to hide it, you're going to confuse beginners.

A better choice of language and tooling can help here. I think starting off with something like Racket would be best. Those who need an IDE (out of laziness, familiarity, whatever) can use DrRacket, and then switch to running their programs from the command line shortly thereafter with next to no transition overhead.