[WhitneyLand]

Those were not my words. I said to discourage all students from using IDEs and debuggers doesn't make sense.

I went quite a while with no tools other than a hex editor to type in op codes. I don't think it did anything except hurt productivity.

Maybe you learn or work better that way. I don't. And I don't see how you justify assuming all new programmers would.

[yarou]

Discouraging someone to use an IDE is more a symptom of the target language's shortcomings. Xcode provided me with beautiful compile-time errors for both Objective-C and Swift, and forced me to really think about what I was doing. Incidentally, I learned both languages from the IDE.

Would I recommend an IDE for a low level language like C? Probably not, because it forces a kind of laziness on the programmer.

Maybe an IDE isn't the solution, but a starting point to build upon. Something that's an interactive environment like LightTable has, where you can quickly eval blocks of code and see the end result without having re-compile your entire program. Certain languages are better suited to this, and certain paradigms (reactive programming comes to mind).