[rileymat1]

It may cause future problems, but things like Visual Basic with the graphical interface are very easy for a child to understand (or at least me). As the artifacts that you are interacting with in the GUI are in the programming environment.

[learning_still]

I think it's much simpler to learn 10 commands in the terminal and use text files than try to grasp what's going on in an IDE. I understand the corner case for GUI building. My first language was C# and this is how I learned how to program. I had no idea what was going on. I had no idea how events worked and the Property Inspector seemed to have a million nuances. I didn't care about learning how to program. I just wanted to make my ideas a reality. The result of this was a lot of frustration. I would say if you are just trying to get something done. You have a product or an idea that you just need to make a reality as soon as possible. If you don't have the patience to wait a month before you can make a GUI, then sure IDE's will do a lot of things for you. But if you plan on programming for more than 6 months, it's worth it to do it the simple way, that makes sense to you. Even if that means you won't be able to get a GUI up and running in 5 seconds.

[Zergy]

> I think it's much simpler to learn 10 commands in the terminal and use text files than try to grasp what's going on in an IDE.

This is true IMO. However you don't need to understand what the IDE is doing to use it now do you? A new user needs to learn nothing more than how to use the project creation wizard, and hit the play/stop button button.

As someone who teaches high school children how to program I assure you from experience and an IDE is much, much simpler than diving into the terminal.

[learning_still]

But that's the point. I didn't need to understand 10 commands in the terminal to run the application. A very small barrier. What IDE's did was create a huge barrier between me and all the other programmers. If something broke or I needed to learn something new, it was all in the context of this magical black box. I wasn't learning how to use my computer. I was learning how to use someone else's program. I could get from point A to point B without knowing what was going on, but ultimately that just caused a lot of frustration. How long would it actually take you to teach a student to compile and run a program written in C?

This example requires the user to be able to do the following that an IDE would not:

- copy paste a file path to the terminal

- cd [pasted filepath]

- make [file name]

- ./[filename]

http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ex1.html

Versus throwing them into a black box where they are overwhelmed with buttons and gizmos and are encouraged to give up on the idea that they will ever know what's going on. Do you honestly think it's not worth the time to teach students how to use the terminal?

[douche]

Then you have to learn how to write makefiles, which means you need to learn at least a little bit about gcc.

Oh, you're on Windows (like 90+% of normal computer users), well there's this thing called Mingw, or you can use Cygwin, which you use in this thing called a command-prompt, which you've probably never used before. Oh, and make sure you have your PATH environmental variables setup correctly. What's an environmental variable?

It's all turtles. Much easier to open Visual Studio, add a project, type out a main method, and hit compile & run. It's a shame QBasic isn't around by default anymore, limited as it was. Which, come to think of it, was a stripped-down, basic IDE.