Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

nora.codes

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 255 posts

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#141

Post by NoraCodes »

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.

My small liberal arts school has this as well. It's a great idea but, at least for me, it was hamstrung by the professors being too reliant on their IDEs.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#142

Post by NoraCodes »

afarrell wrote: post #22
takeda wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I actually think that would mostly confuse a lot of new undergrads. Fundamentals first, variety later (but it's definitely important!)

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#143

Post by dcre »

dvt wrote: post #5

> ... it insulates the student from the javac command line program, and the command line environment itself Such a misguided article. The Java language has (quite literally) nothing to do with `javac`. In fact, there's a lot of other compilers out there. Taking a Java class should not focus on the intricacies and weirdness of Java compiler command line interfaces. It seems pretty amateurish to argue in favor of it. C…

I thought it was obvious that the author means javac as a stand-in for the general idea of compiling and running code from the command line rather than having an IDE do everything for you. Her arguments apply to any Java compiler.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#144

Post by NoraCodes »

mettamage wrote: post #26
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.

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.

That sounds wonderful! A real overview of the programming landscape, and definitely a good start assuming they follow my other points as well. I'd love to take that course.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#145

Post by closeparen »

chii wrote: post #107
snuxoll wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”…

> If you’re teaching Java you should be teaching Maven 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). D…

CS students should be learning those fundamentals by programming, and so they should be taught enough tooling to program without tripping over themselves all the time. Programming without a build system, a version control system, or a reasonably intelligent editor is unnecessarily difficult and gets in the way of the concepts being taught.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#146

Post by NoraCodes »

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'm sorry you had that experience, but you'll note that this isn't what I'm actually suggesting; my suggestion is Python or another dynamic language on any platform so long as it's standardized and accessible, for which I give the example of Ubuntu, but I also mention that Windows with Powershell is an option.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#147

Post by ativzzz »

lxe wrote: post #51

> The issue is, as Kevlin Henney is fond of saying, “Software is nothing but the details.” When students don’t understand what a file is, or haven’t ever edited text in anything but Microsoft Word and don’t realize they can edit code outside of an IDE3, they will not be able to do the crucial work of self-directed learning that is a hallmark of all computer science success. Not sure why the aggressive comments here,…

People who don't know what a file is need to take a computer literacy class before they can jump into something like programming.

An IDE is fine to hide programming related magic for a beginner, but if it needs to hide things like a filesystem, file extensions, navigating through advanced options in simple software like word and internet browsers, or how to use google to help diagnose technical issues, that person is in way over their heads.

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#148

Post by NoraCodes »

joppy wrote: post #103

I think that this is mixing up two different skills. 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…

> 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.

This is absolutely spot on. I used IDE Good/IDE Bad mostly as a way to get people to think about this, and clearly it worked :)

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#149

Post by NoraCodes »

enhdless wrote: post #13

I agree that the file system is not emphasized enough anymore, and I've met a fair share of students who struggle with file paths. Also, in the last section: > or UC Berkeley (oh, I’m sorry, “Cal”) A bit off-topic, but as a Berkeley student, I was a bit amused/confused here, what's the sarcasm in the parenthetical about? According to our official branding guidelines[1] both are acceptable, though Cal is mostly used i…

> as a Berkeley student, I was a bit amused/confused here, what's the sarcasm in the parenthetical about?

Mostly a dig at the UCB faculty and admin, who act like they're better than the rest of the UC. (I'm a UCSD brat.)

Re: Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

#150

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

shawnz wrote: post #92
rubber_duck wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDEs are convenience layers, compilers are essential abstractions - if you don't know how it works underneath the GUI layer you will get stuck really fast and won't be able to troubleshoot when you eventually run in to inevitable problems with IDE, build, compiler.

What makes the CLI interface to the compiler more essential of an abstraction than a GUI interface to the compiler? Just that it is simpler, or that it's been around for longer? A GUI isn't necessarily just calling CLI apps in the background, it could be using programmatic interfaces too.

> "What makes the CLI interface to the compiler more essential of an abstraction than a GUI interface to the compiler?"

Build and CI systems don't go through a GUI IDE, making it required for developers to understand the CLI anyway.

Post reply on HN