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Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

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Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#41

Post by snuxoll »

cutchin wrote: post #16

I'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 to this day I find junior devs struggle with the same things unless they have a maven/gradle project all set up for them.

Personally I’m still shocked that learning the common build tools for whatever language is used for a CS course is not the standard. If you’re teaching Java you should be teaching Maven, if you’re teaching C++ you should be teaching CMake. Not to the “I can write my own plugins/macros level” necessarily but at least to “I can create a project that will build without my specific IDE or needing to recite compiler arcana”.

Nobody in their right mind works without these things, and while knowledge isn’t going to directly transfer from one to the next you should at least have enough to know where to look in the documentation for “how do I specify dependencies”, “how do I tell it where to find my source”, etc.

For a first year course where you aren’t pulling in the kitchen sink the IDE project format works well enough, but if you’re entering the workforce you should know damn well how to create a basic project in the standard tools of your language of choice.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#42

Post by qppo »

jimbob45 wrote: post #30

This 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.

I had the opposite experience. My university decided that they would standardize student development environments on vanilla Visual Studio, put everything that students would ever want into a single header (i swear it was something like "header.h") that you copy/pasted into your project folder and that was it. We didn't even use the terminal.

It was tedious as hell to learn everything else in real world development, like static versus dynamic linking, include/linker paths, make, system libraries, and so on. Like as in myself nor my classmates would have any idea those things existed after two semesters of C++ programming courses.

The moral here is that education needs a degree of breadth. Teaching CS students involves three concepts - Computer Science, Writing Code, and Writing Software. The dependency graph between those topics on what knowledge and tools are needed contains cycles.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#44

Post by mech422 »

bdcravens wrote: post #15

I tend to agree, but I wonder how many in the "IDE bad" camp would agree that in order to obtain your drivers license, you must pass the drivers test on a manual transmission?

Gotta admit - that appeals to me :-P

U.S. drivers licenses are too easy to get as it is... I don't think my sister even had to parallel park on hers.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#45

Post by touisteur »

takeda wrote: post #11
ngngngng wrote: post #2

I 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.

Oh I had a very interesting class in eng. school about programming languages paradigms. About subtle differences between different implementations of the same concept. Ada, C++, Java, C# (could've gone to functional languages but the lesson was painful enough with these 4). Type-erasure, explicit/implicit/partial template instantiation, visibility rules. And then design patterns, in all those languages. How a singleton makes no sense in a language that's not 'full' object and has 'packages' (not the java ones), how GC/RAII/controlled-types change the patterns. It was both a course on 'using language concepts correctly, picking them carefully for a specific need and not 'to avoid writing 3 more lines of code' and also a lesson in 'how can you paint yourself in a corner and prevent yourself from handling the simplest of requirements change'...

Very interesting to see how our mind is shaped by the tools we use.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#46

Post by pkamb »

"public static void main string bracket bracket args"

"public static void main string bracket bracket args"

"public static void main string bracket bracket args"

kind of sad that my first exposure to programming of any kind at University was just repeating that mantra.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#47

Post by ptx »

dvt wrote: post #37
Nightshaxx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the article is the very concept that the compiler and the Java runtime environment are not the same thing (which an IDE obfuscates to some extent) is what he wants students to learn early on. (And details like that). This leads into a lot of important concepts around how programming languages are seen by the computer.

> ... 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/j2…

But learning Java is only useful in the context of programming computers, for which you need to know practical things like files and compilers, which I think is the point of the article.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#48

Post by grawprog »

dvt wrote: post #37
Nightshaxx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the article is the very concept that the compiler and the Java runtime environment are not the same thing (which an IDE obfuscates to some extent) is what he wants students to learn early on. (And details like that). This leads into a lot of important concepts around how programming languages are seen by the computer.

> ... 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/j2…

>Learning a programming language has nothing to do with how it's seen by a computer.

Learning the syntax of a progaming language might not have much to do with how it's seen by a computer but it's important if you want to learn how to use a language properly. If you don't know how Java(or any language) works fundamentally, the code you write may work, but it'll likely be more inefficient both in terms of program and programmer speed.

Debugging sessions will be more frustrating and take longer and generally the quality of the programs you write will be lower compared to programs written with a language's quirks and peculiarities taken into account. Which you learn by understanding how a language works.

I'm not saying they should be able to write a Java compiler or interpreter, but they should have a decent idea how they work at least fundamentally.

It's harder to learn this when it all happens at the push of a button and you never learn to appreciate that button because you've never had to do it yourself and if something goes wrong with that button for some reason, you won't understand how to fix it or work around it.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#49

Post by catalogia »

bdcravens wrote: post #15

I tend to agree, but I wonder how many in the "IDE bad" camp would agree that in order to obtain your drivers license, you must pass the drivers test on a manual transmission?

I don't really care whether or not other people use IDEs, but I lament not learning to drive on a manual transmission.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#50

Post by EdwardDiego »

therealmarv wrote: post #31
cutchin wrote: post #16

I'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…

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…

When I was teaching myself to code I started writing Java in Notepad. Not Notepad++, just Notepad.

And it was as painful as you'd expect, put me right off Java (most of my learning was in Python), and didn't really teach me much that I now use as a developer in a JVM shop.

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