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A comment on Free for students: Professional developer tools from JetBrains. Parent comment

Re:Free for students: Professional developer tools from JetB... by dagw on Monday October 31, 2016 @12:01PM (#12838025)
I really think it should be the other way around, at least in a computer science program. Start them in an as easy environment as possible where they can spend their time learning programming concepts and computer science rather than fighting archaic tools.

Once they're comfortable with programming and understand the basic concepts, then you can step back and explain exactly how to set up a build environment and write a Makefile and all other workflow steps needed to get something that can actually run.

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Re:Free for students: Professional developer tools from JetB... by Symbiote on Monday October 31, 2016 @02:17PM (#12839459)
Having been a tutorial assistant for novice first year computer scientists: the text editor is the easy environment, assuming the lab computers have all been set up correctly with the necessary tools.

The instructions given to students were to use something like gedit, and "javac" and "java". This rarely caused problems, but the students who tried to use Eclipse were more likely to get stuck operating it, or else distracted by it.

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