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by userbinator
2515 days ago
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Students could use an IDE or editor other than Eclipse, but I warned them that I might not be able to help them about IDE specific things. I had a similar policy, although perhaps directly opposed: I supported only vi(m) or Notepad use, but as long as the source was plaintext (either CRLF or LF line endings, but not a mix...), any editor was allowed. Also, they could use MSVC or other C compilers, but the assignments must work on the course servers with GCC (which students could SSH into and work from, as well as where they handed in.) IMHO starting with a "heavy" IDE like Eclipse or VS just furthers the notion that useful software must necessarily be big and complex, or that such software is obligatory to development; not really a good thing to instill in beginners if we want them to be mindful of efficiency in the future. |
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The problem with starting with Notepad is that students then don't get the idea that the 1) editor can help you and 2) the editor is programmable.
And, sorry, vi(m) (or emacs) is simply a non-starter. We live in a GUI world and fighting against that is a disservice to students. I'm not teaching a class to promulgate a religion; I'm teaching to benefit the students and the VAST majority of them will land in Visual Studio, for better or worse. The remaining minority will land in Android Studio/IntelliJ or Xcode.
> not really a good thing to instill in beginners if we want them to be mindful of efficiency in the future.
Sorry, efficiency just isn't on my teaching agenda, like, ever. Even if students wind up using algorithms that use terrible O(n^2) (or worse) behavior, I'm just happy to have correct code.
And, please, Javascript is the lingua franca of the web. Talking about efficiency at that point is like trying to close the barn door after the horses have escaped and died of old age, and the barn has burned down 10 years ago.