100% agree with this. As a way to learn about OOP concepts from first principles, it was fantastic.

Obviously not something to use as a professional, but as a learning tool it was unmatched.

I, also having undergone this horrific treatment, totally agree with this. BlueJ was my first programming editor, as I will not call this an IDE. And because it didn't autocomplete and had an extremely simple debugger I got the hang of Java pretty fast. And we only build really small CLI applications with it anyway. The only thing I missed was auto imports. Especially when you get a little more experienced with Java, this was a bit of a pain.

A nice side effect is that I now sometimes try to race the highlighter/autocomplete. And just see how far I can come without it highlighting or completing. Because I can type pretty quickly and know quite a lot by heart. But that's only because I used BlueJ and thus not relying on autocomplete all the time.

I also used BlueJ in the first semester of CompSci and it was an easy start but I think it can give a false understanding of how things actually work. The fact that you can instantiate objects and call any (public I guess?) method without using code is nice at first but doesn't encourage students to write tests or to concentrate on writing a proper main class. All things that arent't that bad when there's good guidance to the students that this is not all given. Also I'm surprised that this has an actual debugger and not just the inspector, could have used that feature very well but I thought the inspector was all there is.

That's fascinating, I don't think we got into real OOP stuff until much later. Definitely not in the first year I think.