[Jtsummers]

Students should be taught what the terminal is, how to use it, how to program it, and to not be afraid of it during their program. But whether it belongs in a first class or not is debatable. In a first class, students have so many other things to learn that adding on the terminal can be a bit overwhelming (typically the actual material of data structures & algorithms, but also the syntax of some language, the first time they've ever had to be so precise in writing anything down in their lives). I liked how, in the late 90s/early 00s, GT made a point of teaching you to use the terminal in the 3rd CS course (various numbers, 2130, 2230, some others). By that point, you were comfortable with programming itself so learning to use a computer properly wasn't a big addition there.

I was disappointed when I got to grad school and many of my peers didn't even know how to invoke a compiler or interpreter from the command line. If you didn't give them a common IDE, they were absolutely lost.

[wcarey]

The need for precision is such a wonderful thing to teach young people. I start my class with the students typing in exemplar programs and discussing with each other how they think they work. It's amazing how many errors they make in that process; a good reminder of how imprecise we are by default and how unforgiving code is.