[lfowles]

I agree with that to an extent. IDEs are certainly a powerful tool at some fuzzy point in your programming career when you've had enough of the ancillary details and want an environment to help you code. Most IDEs are a distraction to just learning, however, and VB in particular helped me construct a world view where everything in the computer was some big black box I couldn't hope to figure out. Of course, part of that might have been trying to develop on Windows too.