Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

In the CLI, you have to be explicit about what actions are taking place. You have to physically type in what command you want to run and the different arguments to it.

The convenience of a GUI is fantastic, but the abstraction makes it a very bad learning tool. Being able to open up a terminal and fix the inevitable git / build / configuration errors is a very valuable skill that developers should have.

The first skill is learning to program, and in particular learning to program data structures, or algorithms, or whatever. For this you don't care at all how your code builds, you care about correctness and easy to use testing infrastructure, and an IDE like IntelliJ or Eclipse is going to be almost frictionless for that. Teaching command line necessities together with this provides nothing of value for this skill. If I'm trying to get an algorithm right, I don't care at all about how my code builds, I care that it is easy to hit the "recompile and run tests" button. I also think that Java is a decent choice of language for this.

The second skill is learning how to build, version control, package and distribute software, and for this you really need to learn the common tools used in the industry. Which in addition to the IDE, is use of the Unix/Windows command line, git, compilers, Makefiles and build systems, and so on. Here you really need to care about the details - for example, such a project could be to take a previous project and package it so that it runs on a computer without Java/Python/etc installed.

I think the problem is that many universities never have a course on this second skillset, and so while for teaching the first skillset they choose appropriate tools (in my opinion), they leave this second skillset behind completely. But I think the debate is more nuanced than IDE = Good or IDE = Bad, I think we should carefully figure out what skills should be taught, and what the best way to teach those skills are, keeping in mind that for a lot of first-year university students this may be their first introduction to using anything other than a web browser, office programs, and video games on a computer.

* Year 1, term 1: ML, on a Windows machine, using Cambridge ML (for the practicals; the actual course, Foundations of Computer Science, used any Standard ML and recommended Moscow ML)

* Year 1, term 2: Java, on a Linux machine[1], using javac; Eclipse was introduced in another course

* Year 2, term 1: Further Java, on a Linux machine, using Eclipse, Verilog on a Windows machine with a DE2 Board, MIPS assembler using a soft processor (same board) plus one or both of:

* * C/C++, non-compiler specific, no recommended IDE/editor, must run against gcc -std=c99 -Wall --pedantic sourcefile.c or g++ -std=c++98 -Wall --pedantic sourcefile.cc (your choice) with no warnings

* * Prolog, on a Linux machine, using SWI-Prolog

* Year 2, term 2: Group project - group's choice (we used C on an Arm mBed board in whatever IDE that came with and Java in Eclipse)

Everything else (the bulk of the course) was either abstract/theoretical or used you/your supervisors' choice of tools - courses used a varying mix of pseudocode/ML/Java/C where useful, but you didn't necessarily have to use them outside of the lectures and there were no practical exams on these (someone I knew used Haskell for his group project and dissertation, and for testing concepts in supervisions).

The idea was to make you comfortable with the fundamentals and moving between technologies, and not be reliant on any particular set of tools. IMO, the contrasting concepts (Windows vs. Linux; functional vs. object-oriented; high-level vs. low-level; hardware vs. software) did this rather successfully. It didn't necessarily get you completely fluent in any particular language (you were largely expected to do this in your own time if it was a direction you wanted to pursue), but it did prepare you for jumping into pretty much any language/environment and getting up to speed quickly.

(There were also digital electronics and physics practicals in the first year, but they're a bit of a different thing)

[1] It gave you enough bash to run javac and manipulate files. There was a follow-up course the next year that went into a bit more depth on shell, and introduced make/Perl/LaTeX/MATLAB.

no you shouldn't, because the premise is invalid. A university student shouldn't be "learning java". They should be learning programming, and theory of computing (and algorithms etc), and perhaps use java as the language. None of this requires maven, build tools or any tool chains beyond some unit testing framework (and GUI framework if displays are necessary).

Don't teach "industry standard tools" to a uni student learning CS.

I would not expect a new graduate to know maven, or know the intricacies of the spring framework. That's something to be learnt on the job. I expect them to be capable enough to learn this on the job - given that they're well versed in the theoretical aspect of computer science. It's easy to explain maven's core by telling them that it's a directed graph of dependencies.

A student that just learns the "industry standard tooling" should need a bootcamp, not uni degree.

Nonsense.

If we went this way, young people would get completely turned off from programming in the first hours.

Show them Python, Javascript, Scratch. Get them to display something on the screen, anything.

Get that spark.

And once they're hooked, now you can start showing them more details about the wonderful world they have just uncovered.

The author of this article needs to spend a solid five more years thinking about computer science and education because right now, her writing is just dangerously naive.