[twodave]

I hear this. I think much of my early frustrations in programming were things a decent debugger or intellisense would have quickly taught me. That said, having worked with a bunch of folks who got the big nice IDE right away, what I am noticing is they do tend to use the IDE as a crutch. I use my knowledge of the tech to solve a problem efficiently, while they blunder through to a (usually sub-optimal) solution using whatever guard rails the IDE puts in their way. This is a generalization, of course, and even those raised on an IDE can transcend it. But they’re not really being taught to effectively in my opinion.