Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

https://nora.codes/post/stop-making-students-use-eclipse/

by NoraCodes • 6 years ago

276 249 6 years ago

ngngngng• 6 years ago

I completely agree. IDEs obscure the behavior of tools and languages. It's the last thing a student needs. I've been talking for a while about writing a course that teaches programming in 2 or 3 languages side by side to basically so the opposite of this. The specific quirks of languages or the things they obscure with magic melt away when you look at languages side by side. I wish university would teach in this way.

codysc• 6 years ago

I carry this thought process over into my current life. When I start with a new technology/language/etc. I try to start barebones command line, text editor.

I transition quickly into more visual / abstracting tools, but that first foray into the guts really helps ground me with a better understanding of what's actually happening.

takeda2• 6 years ago

UCLA has a class that does this, you have 10 weeks to learn 5 languages and write a non trivial assignment in each: http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/syllabus.html

http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/homework.html

The languages change over the years, but the goal is to have them touch different programming paradigms.

afarrell5• 6 years ago

Thats a different argument, and a much stronger one.

"Universities should offer a class on comparative programming languages and language tooling." is much different than "Intro-to-programming classes should not have a strongly-recommended IDE"

touisteur• 6 years ago

Oh I had a very interesting class in eng. school about programming languages paradigms. About subtle differences between different implementations of the same concept. Ada, C++, Java, C# (could've gone to functional languages but the lesson was painful enough with these 4). Type-erasure, explicit/implicit/partial template instantiation, visibility rules. And then design patterns, in all those languages. How a singleton makes no sense in a language that's not 'full' object and has 'packages' (not the java ones), how GC/RAII/controlled-types change the patterns. It was both a course on 'using language concepts correctly, picking them carefully for a specific need and not 'to avoid writing 3 more lines of code' and also a lesson in 'how can you paint yourself in a corner and prevent yourself from handling the simplest of requirements change'...

Very interesting to see how our mind is shaped by the tools we use.

NoraCodes13• 6 years ago

My small liberal arts school has this as well. It's a great idea but, at least for me, it was hamstrung by the professors being too reliant on their IDEs.

gundmc• 6 years ago

I can see the merit of this, but as an anecdotal counterpoint my first programming class was Fortran 77 using gedit (in the late 2000s). The delayed feedback of whitespace and syntax errors at compile time was painful, slowed down my learning process and distracted from the principles we should have been learning.

NoraCodes13• 6 years ago

Perhaps the problem is that Fortran 77 is, like Java, not the best introductory programming language?

eternalban• 6 years ago

University programs exist to prepare workers for the industry, as a general goal. A subset of students are either already hardcore or will become hardcore developers, cum computer scientists. How should a university 'optimize' their pedagogical approach so that all students are maximally rewarded by their education?

There is no question in my mind that you are correct, in principle. But I wonder if what you propose would in fact result in higher attrition rates. With the current approach, the majority benefit from an IDE that reduces the 'cognitive surface' of the "programming environment", and for those who prefer or gravitate towards the underlying layers, no one will prevent them from firing up e.g. Vim and maven.

That said, yes, don't make students use Eclipse. Make them use IDEA or VS something. /g

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

University programs exist to prepare workers for the industry, as a general goal.

I don't think that it's true that the general goal of University of CS programs is to prepare students for the software dev industry.

mettamage• 6 years ago

CS50 looks quite like what you're describing. One learns:

- C

- Python (+ Flask)

- JavaScript

- SQL

I think this was the order. They learn C the most.

NoraCodes13• 6 years ago

That sounds wonderful! A real overview of the programming landscape, and definitely a good start assuming they follow my other points as well. I'd love to take that course.

JackFr• 6 years ago

As someone who started with C and then made a really hard effort to become an expert C programmer, when later in life I was introduced to Smalltalk and Lisp, I was angry that C had warped my brain and I could only think of programming in the context of a physical machine. I feel it would have been much better to go in the opposite direction.

1f60c2• 6 years ago

Suggestion: in the submission title, replace "Eclipse" with "An IDE".

cirrus3• 6 years ago

yep.. I came here to read why Eclipse sucks compared to IntelliJ or something. Turns out, he hates _all_ IDEs.

1f60c2• 6 years ago

he

she[0], but yeah.

[0] https://twitter.com/noradotcodes

_ZeD_• 6 years ago

I really need to tell you: Eclipse really rocks against other IDEs

dvt2• 6 years ago

... it insulates the student from the javac command line program, and the command line environment itself

Such a misguided article. The Java language has (quite literally) nothing to do with `javac`. In fact, there's a lot of other compilers out there. Taking a Java class should not focus on the intricacies and weirdness of Java compiler command line interfaces. It seems pretty amateurish to argue in favor of it. Case in point: back in high school, I learned C++ using a Borland compiler (and I haven't touched `bcc` in the 15 years since then, even though I've written plenty of C++ in the meantime).

... imports and file naming requirements.

These, again, are (compiler) implementation details and should not be part of a generalized Java curriculum.

And of course, mathematics is the foundation of computer science.

Stuff like this can be misleading and even though not completely wrong (discrete math, logic, metalogic, mathematical logic are sorta' kinda' similar), it's just wrong enough[1] to lead people astray.

[1] https://www.scott-a-s.com/cs-is-not-math/

agumonkey• 6 years ago

it's a regular issue, the more layers between the actual tool (JVM) the less you will need to master, but at the same time the first thing you'll learn is to forget how to use javac or any compiler and just import projects configs or let tools infer stuff for you.

In my personal case, knowing about classpaths the hard way was my only path to salvation. Otherwise I was blindly tweaking IDEs project configs without any idea what was happening.

Nightshaxx4• 6 years ago

The point of the article is the very concept that the compiler and the Java runtime environment are not the same thing (which an IDE obfuscates to some extent) is what he wants students to learn early on. (And details like that). This leads into a lot of important concepts around how programming languages are seen by the computer.

dvt2• 6 years ago

... how programming languages are seen by the computer

Learning a programming language has nothing to do with how it's seen by a computer. That's a different class (a class on compilers, maybe). You can even turn Java into Javascript if you want to[1]. The fact that the compilation/transpilation flow here is Java -> Java Bytecode -> JS is meaningless in the context of learning Java.

[1] https://github.com/google/j2cl

lwf• 6 years ago

what he wants students to learn early on

The author, Leonora Tindall, is a woman.

dahfizz2• 6 years ago

I strongly disagree.

A lot of my peers in college were very bright and could write great code, but they were absolutely useless as developers because they didn't know any tooling. They couldn't compile, run, test, or source control their code if the professor didn't set it up for them.

Yes, tools change, but the knowledge from one tool is almost always transferable. Once you're comfortable on the CLI and understand the concept that Java source is compiled to bytecode and then run on a VM, it's easy to switch to a new compiler.

If you only want to know the absolute bare minimum, go to a boot camp. People go to college to learn, and being comfortable with tools is an essential part of being a developer that students need to learn.

sarakayakomzin• 6 years ago

A lot of my peers in college were very bright and could write great code, but they were absolutely useless as developers

being a useless developer doesn't make it not computer science. not all of computer science is software development.

kqr• 6 years ago

In particular, command line compilers have been used virtually the same way since the first command line interfaces, so knowledge of javac is definitely transferable.

IDEs change more frequently.

shawnz6• 6 years ago

I agree that many developers are not very adept with tooling, but is that because they don't use the CLI? Or is it just that they aren't interested in those parts of software engineering? Eclipse is a tool too, and not a simple one either.

cle2• 6 years ago

Agreed. The least effective developers I’ve had the displeasure of working with never understand how their code executes end-to-end. And the best ones have a deep knowledge of it.

This is no fluke! If you don’t know how a classloader works with the Java classpath, how to set various JVM flags for operating the JVM, etc., then I’d argue that you’re an amateur, and I wouldn’t trust you to write correct code in a production setting. It’s critical knowledge to know how your code runs, and if you don’t know that, then stay away from production systems. If the goal of these courses is to teach students enough about Java to use it in a professional setting, then knowing how classfiles are produced, bundled, distributed, loaded, and executed by a JVM is critical knowledge.

More succinctly, if you don’t know how your code makes it to a production server and gets executed, you’re not ready to work on it.

(And if the goal isn't to teach students how to use Java in a professional setting, then why are they learning it at all? Use a teaching language so students can focus on the concepts instead of Java's idiosyncracies.)

gonehome• 6 years ago

Maybe gradle then? Or actual tooling?

I’d agree that some focus on that in CS programs would extremely valuable. Maybe things are better now, but when I went in 2008-2012 git wasn’t even mentioned and basically all tooling was learned on your own.

hluska• 6 years ago

I haven’t taken an introductory CS course since the mid 90s, so I don’t have enough knowledge to know whether I agree or disagree with you. What was the base level of knowledge like when you were in introductory courses? Back in the day, you couldn’t guarantee that everyone could even turn a computer on, so for loops were a second midterm thing.

Edit - I should mention that my last sentence was the perspective of 18 year old me. I was 18, but in my defence I was 18. :)

xzel2• 6 years ago

Isn't eclipse a piece of tooling? I mean I think the best argument against teaching eclipse is IntelliJ is much better, imo, and is more widespread than eclipse at this point. Student should have a module/class whatever about command line tools as well. I this comparison is comparing two things that aren't comparable, an IDE vs learning the CLI. I also think you contradict yourself in your last sentence. Teaching an IDE in class should help people be comfortable with their tools but at some point they might need to know what the tool is doing under the hood.

watwut3• 6 years ago

IDE counts as tool too. And knowing it is not different the knowing other tools.

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

> ... imports and file naming requirements.
These, again, are (compiler) implementation details and should not be part of a generalized Java curriculum.

In Java, these are language details. You cannot write Java without following them.

NOGDP• 6 years ago

Such a misguided article. The Java language has (quite literally) nothing to do with `javac`. In fact, there's a lot of other compilers out there. Taking a Java class should not focus on the intricacies and weirdness of Java compiler command line interfaces.

Eh, javac is the reference implementation and the language specification makes several references to it, it's also by far the most widely used. It's also good to understand what goes on behind the scenes in your IDE because the IDE is even more removed from the language than the compiler. C++ is somewhat different because it does not have a reference implementation and has a somewhat more diverse set of implementations. Though I think it's still very useful know your way around the gcc or clang command line.

These, again, are (compiler) implementation details and should not be part of a generalized Java curriculum.

Imports and naming are not implementation details... they are defined in the specification.

gentleman11• 6 years ago

As a former student who had to use eclipse, I think the ide dramatically slowed my understanding of what was actuay happening in my projects. A command line and a few commands however really makes things simple and clear.

The only thing you need an ide for is autocomplete and refactoring, and in a small project like you have in school, it’s simpler to use a text editor imho and you can fully understand your project that way too

asveikau• 6 years ago

The thing is, early in their study, students are learning that compilers exist at the same time that they are learning a language. They should become familiar with a compiler, and in the case of Java that it generates class files, that they pass them to a JVM, to inform them of the state of the art of tooling architecture, or even to help them imagine that they could change some pieces or swap them out.

Using the tools directly serves to re-enforce all these concepts.

They can get to know other tools for that same language like in your Borland example, sure. But if you didn't know the compiler existed, you would be in trouble. And in C you will also want to understand the preprocessor and linker.

torben-friis• 6 years ago

I think there's great value in learning to use a lightweight editor, a compiler or interpreter, the command line, etc.

I also think that Java is perhaps the worst possible choice for that.

It's a language created with the "build once run anyway" mentality that tries to abstract away the system, it's the poster child of languages married to an IDE, and verbose to the point that forcing people to write java code without autocompletion features probably violates the Geneva convention.

At this point in time if you want your students to learn about tooling it would be more useful to teach them to use chrome's JavaScript console than to teach them to use a Java compiler through the command line.

aww_dang2• 6 years ago

verbose to the point that forcing people to write java code without autocompletion features probably violates the Geneva convention.

I'm happy to use just emacs. The naming conventions make it easy enough to remember. I've never been a fan of heavy IDEs. Maybe that is just me as a solo developer/entrepreneur, but I don't think that I am the only one.

Once you decouple yourself from the IDE and all of the bloated enterprizey (ahem spring) frameworks, it is actually pleasant to work with. Most of that stuff is superfluous when you have a command of the environment.

patrickthebold• 6 years ago

I think there's a bit of personal preference. As a student I hated IDEs, because I couldn't tell what was actually happening. To this day, I avoid using and IDE or other tool for git/version control, because I can't tell what it is doing.

There's more typing with a text editor and javac, but it's much simpler to understand IMHO.

All of this must be understood in the context of first year programming. For my class, there were no libraries that one needed, and at most 10 or so java files to compile. The classpath would never need to be more than the working directory.

dcre• 6 years ago

I thought it was obvious that the author means javac as a stand-in for the general idea of compiling and running code from the command line rather than having an IDE do everything for you. Her arguments apply to any Java compiler.

fergie• 6 years ago

Once students finally graduate they might be unlucky enough to land a job as a Java developer. Here they will live and breathe continuous integration where its essential to write build scripts that can be exported to other environments, and the only way to do this is to use command line recipes.

smitty1e• 6 years ago

Related classic rant: "Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? Ruminations on the Psychology and Aesthetics of Coding"

http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.htm...

stefan_• 6 years ago

If there is one thing that Eclipse doesn't do is insulate anyone. Half of Java Enterprise development involves various concoctions of Eclipse projects.

I'm not sure what the difference is between a student learning about Eclipse idiosyncrasies or .DS_STORE files. One topic is as pointless as the other.

pacetherace• 6 years ago

While I agree with not using very advanced IDEs. It is important to have the means to quickly navigate standard libraries. MSDN gets my vote for that.

ericmcer• 6 years ago

I like the idea of starting in a browser. It is a more familiar way to get people used to the concept of text controlling behavior. The jump to compilation and executables might still be difficult, but it’s way better than students on their second year who only know how to run their programs by clicking a green triangle.

DrKabab• 6 years ago

Harvard's CS50 does a great job at this. My first intro to CS was through this course, and I'm grateful I did it this way rather than wait till I was taught in the "broken" way at college.

enhdless• 6 years ago

I agree that the file system is not emphasized enough anymore, and I've met a fair share of students who struggle with file paths.

Also, in the last section:

or UC Berkeley (oh, I’m sorry, “Cal”)

A bit off-topic, but as a Berkeley student, I was a bit amused/confused here, what's the sarcasm in the parenthetical about? According to our official branding guidelines[1] both are acceptable, though Cal is mostly used in athletic contexts.

[1] pg34-35, https://brand.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Berkel...

NoraCodes13• 6 years ago

as a Berkeley student, I was a bit amused/confused here, what's the sarcasm in the parenthetical about?

Mostly a dig at the UCB faculty and admin, who act like they're better than the rest of the UC. (I'm a UCSD brat.)

bdcravens• 6 years ago

I tend to agree, but I wonder how many in the "IDE bad" camp would agree that in order to obtain your drivers license, you must pass the drivers test on a manual transmission?

mech422• 6 years ago

Gotta admit - that appeals to me :-P

U.S. drivers licenses are too easy to get as it is... I don't think my sister even had to parallel park on hers.

lordalch• 6 years ago

Since I got my driver's license over a decade ago, I've had to parallel-park less than ten times. I've probably changed a flat tire more often.

I think you would find that the vast majority of drivers in the US don't parallel park even once per year. Furthermore, an increasing fraction of new cars can park automatically.

The chief value of having a road test, in my mind, is to force most teens to learn to drive in a structured program that introduces rules of the road and safe habits. Parallel parking is rare and not dangerous, so we shouldn't waste the limited hours that teens spend with professional driving educators on it.

catalogia2• 6 years ago

I don't really care whether or not other people use IDEs, but I lament not learning to drive on a manual transmission.

chii3• 6 years ago

Why? I would expect manual drives to diminish in popularity over time. It's harder to use, and does not give any benefits at all, other than a slightly cheaper price, and a slightly higher performance if the user is knowledgeable.

An auto transmission is so much better in every respect, and the performance improvements in manual hardly comes into play during every day use.

Nullabillity• 6 years ago

At least here in Sweden, manual and automatic transmissions have different driver's licenses, a manual license lets you drive both. Since getting the license is pretty expensive to begin with (with no difference between the two), people tend to prefer getting the manual one.

ineedasername3• 6 years ago

I think it might be more fair to say the "IDE bad" camp is comparable to folks that would say you shouldn't be able to press the "auto parallel park" button on your smart car to pass that part of the test.

LordDragonfang• 6 years ago

Well, considering being able to parallel park is a really insignificant part of being a good driver, and the biggest complaint I hear on the internet is people apparently not knowing where the turn signal is on their car, perhaps people should be required to know more about the buttons on their car.

stordoff4• 6 years ago

How much of a difference does learning on a manual actually make? I learnt in the UK, where it's the norm to learn in a manual, and I know after about 5 lessons, it's not really something I thought about. It became habitual very quickly (other than _occasionally_ on steep hills, which took a few lessons longer), and it's something I picked up whilst learning other things anyway.

cutchin• 6 years ago

I'm not sure I agree much with this. When I first started learning Java I had six or seven years of programming experience and I still found dealing with matters of classpath and javac remarkably complicated. I had things down well enough with the tools I used before, but it all seemed so foreign in the Java world.

And to this day I find junior devs struggle with the same things unless they have a maven/gradle project all set up for them.

I'm all for folks learning these skills eventually, but in a first-year CS class I'd really rather students worry about the language and general concepts of writing software.

Lots of javascript tutorials start off with opening and browser's javascript console and typing out some simple stuff and I don't think people would tell them they need to jump straight into node.js and webpack.

All the other intricacies of writing systems will come to them but I find something uniquely wonderful about sitting and writing code, and if we're lucky we'll find students who can have that same experience. I'd rather meet them where they are and talk purely of the language and core concepts, and introduce them to the ugly details as their progress dictates.

afarrell5• 6 years ago

and general concepts of writing software.

Especially if it is their first experience writing code. Until a student learns to tolerate the discomfort of "the machine isn't doing what I want for some inscrutable reason", it makes no sense to throw them into package-management errors.

therealmarv• 6 years ago

Actually I agree for the Java world here. Thanks to the design of Java and many Java libraries you cannot write a little more complex Java code from your mind. Even importing all this nested OOP libraries is complicated without an IDE. For me Java is really a language which is impossible or too time consuming to master without a good IDE.

Working for many years in the python world professionally some people are still amazed that I'm essentially using more or less a normal text editor. IDE is optional for many languages but for some languages it's a strong requirement.

EdwardDiego3• 6 years ago

When I was teaching myself to code I started writing Java in Notepad. Not Notepad++, just Notepad.

And it was as painful as you'd expect, put me right off Java (most of my learning was in Python), and didn't really teach me much that I now use as a developer in a JVM shop.

lawl• 6 years ago

I also was working with java professionally for many years, and I find it completely unbearable to write java without an IDE.

For other languages, e.g. go, which i currently like, I don't use an IDE because I don't feel like I need one.

In my opinion IDEs are often just a crutch for bad languages and I can understand the sentiment in the article, but yeah, java.

bernawil• 6 years ago

Java is special since the whole compile/link/run loop is relatively slow and there's no REPL. In Nodejs or python you are expected to just run your code. Any error like a bad import/require statement you can correct quickly and re-run. Maybe even add/remove print statements while at it. And it's not just dynamic languages! You can have the same experience in Haskell.

snuxoll• 6 years ago

And to this day I find junior devs struggle with the same things unless they have a maven/gradle project all set up for them.

Personally I’m still shocked that learning the common build tools for whatever language is used for a CS course is not the standard. If you’re teaching Java you should be teaching Maven, if you’re teaching C++ you should be teaching CMake. Not to the “I can write my own plugins/macros level” necessarily but at least to “I can create a project that will build without my specific IDE or needing to recite compiler arcana”.

Nobody in their right mind works without these things, and while knowledge isn’t going to directly transfer from one to the next you should at least have enough to know where to look in the documentation for “how do I specify dependencies”, “how do I tell it where to find my source”, etc.

For a first year course where you aren’t pulling in the kitchen sink the IDE project format works well enough, but if you’re entering the workforce you should know damn well how to create a basic project in the standard tools of your language of choice.

chii3• 6 years ago

If you’re teaching Java you should be teaching Maven

no you shouldn't, because the premise is invalid. A university student shouldn't be "learning java". They should be learning programming, and theory of computing (and algorithms etc), and perhaps use java as the language. None of this requires maven, build tools or any tool chains beyond some unit testing framework (and GUI framework if displays are necessary).

Don't teach "industry standard tools" to a uni student learning CS.

I would not expect a new graduate to know maven, or know the intricacies of the spring framework. That's something to be learnt on the job. I expect them to be capable enough to learn this on the job - given that they're well versed in the theoretical aspect of computer science. It's easy to explain maven's core by telling them that it's a directed graph of dependencies.

A student that just learns the "industry standard tooling" should need a bootcamp, not uni degree.

otabdeveloper4• 6 years ago

...if you’re teaching C++ you should be teaching CMake.

I've been programming very advanced C++ for close to 20 years now.

Never had any reason to use CMake.

Plain old make for when you just want to build something without expending effort and brain cells, or (nowadays) nix if you're putting together an industrial-strength build environment.

CMake is the worst of all worlds, and provides no benefit unless you really want to build Windows exe's with Microsoft's proprietary tooling. (And let's face it, Windows is a legacy dying platform here in 2020.)

NoraCodes13• 6 years ago

I'm all for folks learning these skills eventually, but in a first-year CS class I'd really rather students worry about the language and general concepts of writing software.

This is a big part of why I recommend that another language should be used to teach introductory level courses. Java has too much additional complexity. That complexity has benefits in production, but not for first-year undergrads.

jussij2• 6 years ago

I still found dealing with matters of classpath and javac remarkably complicated.

I started my programming career writing C and C++ using the cli and a text editor.

Some years later I ended doing some Java and to me I found it quite easy as I could see similarities with things I had learned writing C and C++.

I could see the classpath and jar files where roughly equivalent to the concept of libraries and libpath found in the C and C++ linker (only much easier to use) and the javac was roughly equivalent to the gcc or g++ command line compilers.

afarrell5• 6 years ago

Most importantly, though, it limits the ability of their peers to learn. If a 300-level software engineering class which budgeted a week to teach basic version control skills has to take a two-day detour to teach the Windows users how to get rid of the CRLFs in their commits, and teach the Mac users to remove the .DS_Store files from their repositories, and get everyone set up in Eclipse EGIT, that’s wasted time. If the professor has to schedule time with students outside of class to demonstrate their code because so many students aren’t able to submit their code in a form that successfully runs on the professor’s computer, that’s wasted time for both professors and students, and it undermines important lessons about portability and good practices.

This is might be an argument against a particular IDE setup for a class, but it isn't an argument against IDEs in general. Instead it is an argument for providing a config file to make these problems go away.

When students have only ever programmed in Java using some bespoke learning library provided by their professor, it will take them much longer than necessary to figure out other languages, other libraries, and other approaches.

The article doesn't support the case that an intro class using an IDE prevents students from learning anything else. The class doesn't set people back--it merely fails to move them forward in that way. I agree that it is important to teach this eventually. But it should be through teaching it deliberately. (EDIT: Someone else posted a link to a class which compares different languages and their tooling side-by-side. That sounds fantastic.)

I have yet to see a class which can do a good job of teaching how package management works to a degree that the student can then confidently debug weird setuptools errors.

I've been looking for such a class since 2009.

The_rationalist• 6 years ago

Defering learning of implementation details is virtuous and on the plus side, intellij IDEs have state of the art static analysis that show to the coder anti patterns and help it rewrite them in a cleaner way, and with an explanation.

Autocompletion and integrated documentation do increase discoverability and learning of the language, not the reverse.

BTW intellij has launched an IDE specialized for teaching: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2019/10/intellij-idea-edu-ea...

Havoc• 6 years ago

Yeah I found Eclipse a pain to set up for python the first time I tried. Kept throwing weird Java errors and GUI glitches. Abandoned that plan very fast

erdos4d• 6 years ago

Wait, I shouldn't make students learn the tool they will be forced to use when they get a job? Um, no.

nullc• 6 years ago

People who learn the tool alone are substantially unhireable.

When you hire a developer you usually need them to also be at least be something of an expert computer user, especially if they're going to be working on a small team without 20 other experts to micromanage them.

Over-reliance on the IDEs leaves people appliance operators that are lost when there isn't a magic button to press.

It isn't just an issue in the job market. "Programmers" who aren't sufficiently advanced computer users can't advance their own projects in academia either-- they're stuck working on precooked assignments. I suspect this is one of the forces that has resulted in academic research being utterly starved for competent software engineering (though the main one remains that competent software engineers can get stable high paying jobs, and academia provides them with neither).

oreally• 6 years ago

Always good to get students to dig deeper, even if it's for their initial 1st/2nd semester, and especially if they're going to be programming long term. But ofc let them have the freedom to choose afterwards.

msingh_5• 6 years ago

I guess the sentiment is more like "Don't make students start programming in IDEs first"

I get it. It shields them from understanding what's happening underneath. But not everybody is interested or needs to know all the things happening underneath, and its okay. If they're going to learn the whole stack, they will.

afarrell5• 6 years ago

Even for someone who is interested in knowing what happens underneath. To succeed at actions, it important not to expand the scope of what you're trying to do too broadly.

8f2ab37a-ed6c• 6 years ago

The music analogy here would be: We'd like you to learn the C major scale, but first, please become familiar with Pro Tools.

dacracot• 6 years ago

I agree, and it has been going on for a very long time. I have coworkers who's productivity (if you can call it that) would slide to zero if you took away Eclipse. If it isn't implemented in an Eclipse plugin, well forget it. Setting up the deployment environment is so far outside of their capability as to be a joke. And these people have been out of college for over a decade.

jimbob45• 6 years ago

This can fuck right off. My elitist university decided that if it wasn’t pure C built on a Linux box, then it wasn’t worth using. Consequently, I never learned how much more enjoyable and quick programming could be until I used VS at my first job. Even worse, I was a VS novice, struggling to perform even the most rudimentary of debugging techniques, despite being fairly fluent in GDB/Valgrind.

qppo• 6 years ago

I had the opposite experience. My university decided that they would standardize student development environments on vanilla Visual Studio, put everything that students would ever want into a single header (i swear it was something like "header.h") that you copy/pasted into your project folder and that was it. We didn't even use the terminal.

It was tedious as hell to learn everything else in real world development, like static versus dynamic linking, include/linker paths, make, system libraries, and so on. Like as in myself nor my classmates would have any idea those things existed after two semesters of C++ programming courses.

The moral here is that education needs a degree of breadth. Teaching CS students involves three concepts - Computer Science, Writing Code, and Writing Software. The dependency graph between those topics on what knowledge and tools are needed contains cycles.

NoraCodes13• 6 years ago

I'm sorry you had that experience, but you'll note that this isn't what I'm actually suggesting; my suggestion is Python or another dynamic language on any platform so long as it's standardized and accessible, for which I give the example of Ubuntu, but I also mention that Windows with Powershell is an option.

gwbas1c• 6 years ago

What they can’t do, unless they’ve figured it out on their own, is operate a computer outside of the confines of the IDE they’ve been taught.

Understanding what a file is and what a text editor should be prerequisites for entering a computer science department. Someone who doesn't understand these concepts has no business learning to program.

At my "not MIT" school, it was expected that most incoming CS students understood some basic programming before they entered school.

A CD department that tolerates students who don't know what a file is probably has other problems.

SaxonRobber• 6 years ago

That excludes a huge number of students who will have never had the experience to try programming before university.

I never did any programming before my first year, I was planning on going into economics. But then I took an elective in CS and it became my major. I wasn’t alone either, most of the students were not programmers previously.

augustt• 6 years ago

At actual MIT there are no expectations like this.

stordoff4• 6 years ago

At my "not MIT" school, it was expected that most incoming CS students understood some basic programming before they entered school.

At Cambridge (UK), this is _not_ the case. They merely note that "some knowledge of procedural programming is useful"[1] and "[n]o prior knowledge of programming is required"[2]. The main thing they are looking for, in terms of qualifications, is mathematics, so you'd typically see an A-level in mathematics plus two further ones in further mathematics, the physical sciences, or computing depending on what your school offers.

At interview (for two colleges), I was not asked about programming - the first was purely mathematics based, and the second was primarily maths based with some CS concepts introduced to see how you thought about and were able to manipulate the information given in the interview. It's not something you were necessarily expected to know.

Until this year, the introductory CS modules (making up 25% of the first year's content) were available to natural sciences students, so you would have students from a fairly wide range of backgrounds _successfully_ learning CS and to program (the maths modules, also making up 25%, are still shared, for what it's worth).

[1] https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/entry

[2] https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/computer-s...

pbhjpbhj• 6 years ago

Using Java or Python in a professional IDE like IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans, PyCharm, or Eclipse is not a good first introduction to programming for computer science students, whether they’re in the field to become web developers, systems software engineers, or academic computer science researchers. //

So "for computer science students".

Which seems like too major a thing to miss out of the title.

Also, how does webdev fit in here: seems like webdevs should probably be using IDEs from lesson 2. And I say that as someone who started their web content production path writing HTML in pico.

ashton314• 6 years ago

The author brings this up as a reason for using an IDE:

This is valuable in an introductory course, as it avoids wasting class time and lowers the barrier to entry

and then proceeds to argue why other things are more important than that.

I don't like Eclipse or other IDEs, having watched my fellow students get stymied by basic issues that I could resolve with one or two relatively simple instructions on the command line. I think IDEs can be a crutch that programmers ought to learn to do without. Learning what the "real" tools are will pay dividends—quickly too.

That being said, I think it's important that the barrier to entry be low. Java almost necessitates the use of an IDE. There's so much "enterprise" cruft involved in doing the simplest things that, unless you have an IDE to hide it, you're going to confuse beginners.

A better choice of language and tooling can help here. I think starting off with something like Racket would be best. Those who need an IDE (out of laziness, familiarity, whatever) can use DrRacket, and then switch to running their programs from the command line shortly thereafter with next to no transition overhead.

dionian• 6 years ago

i agree with everyone saying you shouldnt use IDE as a crutch.. but as a seasoned Java dev, it is probably my main exception to the rule as well. I would just recommend intellij over eclipse for beginners, but its better than nothing.

uk_programmer• 6 years ago

I agree with sentiment of this. I meet a lot of developers that cannot function outside of the IDE (in my case Visual Studio). As a consequence they struggle when the IDE fails.

pkamb2• 6 years ago

"public static void main string bracket bracket args"

kind of sad that my first exposure to programming of any kind at University was just repeating that mantra.

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

Wait until you learn that you can use

  public static void main(String... args)

;)

pkamb2• 6 years ago

I gave up Java immediately after that class!

bori5• 6 years ago

You missed two parentheses

lxe• 6 years ago

The issue is, as Kevlin Henney is fond of saying, “Software is nothing but the details.” When students don’t understand what a file is, or haven’t ever edited text in anything but Microsoft Word and don’t realize they can edit code outside of an IDE3, they will not be able to do the crucial work of self-directed learning that is a hallmark of all computer science success.

Not sure why the aggressive comments here, but I agree with this. IDE for learning programming ends up shielding you from reality that you should probably understand before you use an IDE.

ativzzz• 6 years ago

People who don't know what a file is need to take a computer literacy class before they can jump into something like programming.

An IDE is fine to hide programming related magic for a beginner, but if it needs to hide things like a filesystem, file extensions, navigating through advanced options in simple software like word and internet browsers, or how to use google to help diagnose technical issues, that person is in way over their heads.

sumukh1• 6 years ago

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about this while helping build software & TA'ing for Berkeley's introductory course (which uses Python & Scheme) and I largely agree with the author. If you're wondering why the author ignores large schools, it's because they have the resources to invest in this. Here's a sample of the things the efforts that Berkeley did for their introductory course [1]

* Online tools to run & visualize code execution directly from the online textbook (ex: https://composingprograms.com/pages/16-higher-order-function...) * Easy submission for students (no git in CS1, no scp, no printing) * Instructor autograding for all assignments so the course staff could focus on reviewing code for style/other components. * Automatically backing up student code * In some assignments, there were automated hints for syntax, styling, and even correctness [2, 3] * Online collaborative editing for partner assignments [4] * Full time staff allocated to building teaching infrastructure to "reduce accidental complexities when using code to solve problems" * Completely hosted environments (via Jupyter Notebooks or Scratch) for courses with a lot of non-majors.

[1] https://cs61a.org [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3059009.3059058 [3] https://okpy.org/about/publications/ [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=polTBnMXGQI&rel=0

BeetleB• 6 years ago

In the introductory classes I took, there was no IDE. We telnet into a server, and were taught Pico as an editor (although you were free to use vi or emacs if you wanted). You compiled using g++. You did everything via the command line.

Most of the problems the author is pointing out existed there as well.

The author is misguided in assuming that IDE's are the cause.

jcrawfordor2• 6 years ago

I can't help but feel like this article is less a condemnation of IDEs in introductory teaching and more a condemnation of java in introductory teaching.

It feels like the use of Eclipse or IntelliJ in intro CS courses is so common in large part because Java has such relatively complex tooling and language conventions. I've never seen someone intro Python with an IDE, because it's extremely easy to use Python without one. The same goes for C, and indeed all of the intro C classes I've seen have gone without an IDE. Java, though... you really could spend an extended part of the course just getting everyone setting up their first file and using the compiler correctly, if it's the first language.

vips7L2• 6 years ago

I don't see how java tooling is any more complex than any other language, they all have learning curves. Even Python has complexities around venv, requirements, pipfile etc. C's tooling in particular is probably the worst. You have to learn the compiler, the linker, or a 3rd party tool like cmake or meson.

Using an IDE in Java is a choice just like picking PyCharm is for python.

NoraCodes13• 6 years ago

I agree with you in general, but here I am discussing introductory CS programs. It's very hard for an intro CS student to build and run a Java program without an IDE, even with help from the professor. It's completely trivial for that same student to write and run most of the Python programs they'll be doing in their intro class after having installed _just Python_.

jcrawfordor2• 6 years ago

I feel like this kind of makes the point though... while all of this tooling does exist for Python, it's very easy to use Python without any of it at all. So it can be relegated to more of an advanced, 'production-ready' topic, e.g. in a software engineering course. Indeed, I've never seen an intro course in either Python or C that touches on any of this tooling, save one professor who distributed a standard makefile for his intro C course - but I'm honestly not sure why. It usually suffices just fine to have the students call gcc themselves, the projects they work on in the first year aren't big enough to make this cumbersome.

While that's partially true of Java, it's less true of Java. More of the tooling around Java is de facto required.

NoraCodes13• 6 years ago

I can't help but feel like this article is less a condemnation of IDEs in introductory teaching and more a condemnation of java in introductory teaching.

It is both, but I started with the IDEs because they are the chicken of this chicken and egg problem. Java is too complex, so schools reach for IDEs, which just makes things more complicated, et cetera.

If a standard development environment could be devised that hides the incidental complexity of Java without hiding the essential complexity of file systems, etc., I think it would solve the problem just as well as teaching Python.

jbverschoor• 6 years ago

Actually.. for the basic basics it's fine to do let them use a text editor and compiler.

But after like 2 files, it's easier to learn the language due to autocomplete and errorchecking.

The whole compilation / dependency stack, well I don't think that's the issue here.

zmmmmm• 6 years ago

I thought this was going to be the standard Eclipse bashing and then found it was more fundamental than that.

In many ways Eclipse is one of the less problematic IDEs because it does expose a lot of the underlying warts... it's one of the reasons people dislike it (among others, to be clear - memory usage, less fluid ergonmics in many other ways). But one of the reasons I have stuck with it is that, like when you understand Git at a fundamental level it all "makes sense", Eclipse has a better direct relationship to the underlying mechanics than other IDEs I've used.

nunez• 6 years ago

Truth. I work with plenty of engineers that have only written Java with Eclipse or Jetbrains. Many have a lot of trouble getting their app to compile locally when asked to do so upon moving the app into containers. Many also had issues even writing software upon trying to use something like Vi or VSCode.

At some point, the training wheels need to come off.

lonelappde• 6 years ago

This article is a confused mess with no point. Sure it would be nice to teach students everything at first. But that's obviously impossible.

mr_toad• 6 years ago

People often forget how few hours go into a typical university paper.

It’s not unlikely that a programmer with a full-time job could put in more hours in just one month than a student would for an entire introduction to programming paper.

It’s unrealistic to expect to be able to cover all aspects of programming in such a short time.

bcruddy2• 6 years ago

I feel like people upvoted this because it said don't use eclipse but didn't read the article. Now I'm questioning my sanity - given a choice, do professional developers choose to use eclipse?

The question is somewhat loaded given the previous statement based on my own biases but I've never written java professionally so excuse my ignorance.

vips7L2• 6 years ago

Most java devs use intellij. But the eclipse language server powers the vs-code plugin for java. It's quite good and it's what I use personally.

bcruddy2• 6 years ago

Totally makes sense as a plugin - I love vscode for both golang and javascript. The IDE itself seems clunky but I'm not against IDEs themselves.

blendo• 6 years ago

Eclipse seems to have carved out a popular niche in the field of embedded C and C++. (JetBrains, please take note.)

Guest42• 6 years ago

In my academic experience netbeans was used and it seemed to simplify things.

rschulman• 6 years ago

My first year CS classes went by SCIP and were taught in scheme. Of course, I went to a place that didn't much distinguish between comp sci and comp eng, so what do I know?

ineedasername3• 6 years ago

Honestly I wasn't aware that current curriculums used any sort of advanced IDE's.

When I took courses in the late 90's & early 00's, from assembly, c++, java and python the focus was on minimal text editors and command line compile, link etc. Though for python, Idle was promoted, but that's pretty bare bones relatively speaking.

I wasn't aware that a shift away from basics had occurred.

thewebcount2• 6 years ago

First, in a Java-focused curriculum, it insulates the student from the javac command line program, and the command line environment itself.

I take exception to this line of thinking. Students should not be using the command line for programming. I believe that forcing students to learn to use command line tools is the reason why so much software has such horrible user experience. They learn that users don't matter unless they've steeped themselves in the arcana of each particular program and have practically become programmers themselves.

Second, it catches some basic mistakes and allows the student to defer learning about the finnicky language requirements that aren’t deemed core to the curriculum, like imports and file naming requirements.

I had the exact opposite experience. At university, they sat us down at a Unix shell with almost no instruction on the shell or the compiler. We spent so much time learning the finicky shell requirements (and which we had no clear understanding were part of the shell and not the compiler itself or something else), that we were sidelined from understanding what the compiler was telling us or how it worked. You'd run your program and if it gave you an error 11, well, you just read and re-read it until you noticed something off.

Nowadays with an IDE and a static analyzer, it can show my code and show the exact path of execution that will lead to an invalid memory access before I've even run it. Students can learn to find problems themselves because it's laid out right in front of their eyes in relatively-understandable java or C or whatever language they're programming in. They don't need to worry about, "Oh when I compile on this machine, I have to specify the -I argument to the compiler for includes, but on machines I actually use in real life, I don't have to specify anything because it finds all the files I'm actually using because I put them into the IDE myself and can see their relationships."

it’s crucial to introduce these inconvenient details eventually.

Why? If I'm going to be downloading my IDE from the Internet or an App Store why the heck should I ever learn fiddly Unix commands? I'm writing GUI-based applications. I don't need to understand any of that crap if I don't want to. It's like saying you can't be a taxi driver if you don't understand how the carburetor works. Really? My job is to drive the car around, not to fix it. I know a good mechanic who can do that if the need arises. If they want to learn it, then all the better, but it shouldn't be a requirement.

What they can’t do, unless they’ve figured it out on their own, is operate a computer outside of the confines of the IDE they’ve been taught.

On the contrary, I had no problem operating the GUI-based computers of my day. It was the bizarre, often contradictory commands in the Unix shell that baffled me. Their names were often stupid puns, their "help" pages did no such thing, and I wasted years learning a bunch of stuff that ended up not being very helpful in the real world.

When students have only ever programmed in Java using some bespoke learning library provided by their professor, it will take them much longer than necessary to figure out other languages, other libraries, and other approaches.

That has nothing to do with IDEs. That has to do with a deficient teaching environment, and is the exact same problem I described above, which sounds like what the author is advocating.

Teaching someone to use git is very difficult if they’ve never been taught that a file is an logical unit composed of bytes and metadata.

No, teaching someone to use git is very difficult because it was designed to be difficult because the self-absorbed creator thinks that people should have to suffer to become good programmers. It's just sadistic.

Students need to know how to use computers before they can program them in a serious way.

I agree, and what the author is proposing sounds like the opposite of that to me.

After the first foray into programming, take time to teach students about the UNIX command line.

Ugh. I disagree strongly with this sentiment. CS students need to get away from the mentality that Unix is the be-all-end-all of operating systems and programming environments and the quicker that happens the better in my opinion.

yters• 6 years ago

I like Eclipse, but now that I know my way about, it's much easier to knock out a small Java problem on the command line than to fire up Eclipse, setup a project, etc. Then there's all the magical metadata and whatnot that can get screwed up.

Much less mental overhead and less things to worry about on the Linux command line. Plus, I can do more with the commandline tools.

I think students in general will be more versatile if they start with the command line, and then graduate to Eclipse. That way, they'll realize what they lose and gain in an IDE.

cordite• 6 years ago

I used to do C, C++, Haskell, and php in sublime when I was a student.

But I greatly disagree about students using IDEs on languages like Java. Getting familiar with debuggers, stepping around, that's absolutely a necessary skill--unless you want to go into stdio, or echo based debugging (which is what I'd do with the languages above).

joppy2• 6 years ago

I think that this is mixing up two different skills.

The first skill is learning to program, and in particular learning to program data structures, or algorithms, or whatever. For this you don't care at all how your code builds, you care about correctness and easy to use testing infrastructure, and an IDE like IntelliJ or Eclipse is going to be almost frictionless for that. Teaching command line necessities together with this provides nothing of value for this skill. If I'm trying to get an algorithm right, I don't care at all about how my code builds, I care that it is easy to hit the "recompile and run tests" button. I also think that Java is a decent choice of language for this.

The second skill is learning how to build, version control, package and distribute software, and for this you really need to learn the common tools used in the industry. Which in addition to the IDE, is use of the Unix/Windows command line, git, compilers, Makefiles and build systems, and so on. Here you really need to care about the details - for example, such a project could be to take a previous project and package it so that it runs on a computer without Java/Python/etc installed.

I think the problem is that many universities never have a course on this second skillset, and so while for teaching the first skillset they choose appropriate tools (in my opinion), they leave this second skillset behind completely. But I think the debate is more nuanced than IDE = Good or IDE = Bad, I think we should carefully figure out what skills should be taught, and what the best way to teach those skills are, keeping in mind that for a lot of first-year university students this may be their first introduction to using anything other than a web browser, office programs, and video games on a computer.

NoraCodes13• 6 years ago

I think we should carefully figure out what skills should be taught, and what the best way to teach those skills are, keeping in mind that for a lot of first-year university students this may be their first introduction to using anything other than a web browser, office programs, and video games on a computer.

This is absolutely spot on. I used IDE Good/IDE Bad mostly as a way to get people to think about this, and clearly it worked :)

joppy2• 6 years ago

Yes, I’ve thought about it before, since at my university they started on an entirely-eclipse sort of syllabus, and then overcorrected massively to command line. A bunch of new CS undergrads were driven off because they thought that programming was mostly memorising arcane command line invocations just to get simple code to run, and that just doesn’t seem right to me.

Out of interest, your original article pointed out the potential use of repl.it as an alternative to Eclipse and friends, but isn’t it still the whole build-in-a-box experience?

stordoff4• 6 years ago

I liked the approach Cambridge took for computer science (at least while I was there). Practical assessments:

* Year 1, term 1: ML, on a Windows machine, using Cambridge ML (for the practicals; the actual course, Foundations of Computer Science, used any Standard ML and recommended Moscow ML)

* Year 1, term 2: Java, on a Linux machine[1], using javac; Eclipse was introduced in another course

* Year 2, term 1: Further Java, on a Linux machine, using Eclipse, Verilog on a Windows machine with a DE2 Board, MIPS assembler using a soft processor (same board) plus one or both of:

* * C/C++, non-compiler specific, no recommended IDE/editor, must run against gcc -std=c99 -Wall --pedantic sourcefile.c or g++ -std=c++98 -Wall --pedantic sourcefile.cc (your choice) with no warnings

* * Prolog, on a Linux machine, using SWI-Prolog

* Year 2, term 2: Group project - group's choice (we used C on an Arm mBed board in whatever IDE that came with and Java in Eclipse)

Everything else (the bulk of the course) was either abstract/theoretical or used you/your supervisors' choice of tools - courses used a varying mix of pseudocode/ML/Java/C where useful, but you didn't necessarily have to use them outside of the lectures and there were no practical exams on these (someone I knew used Haskell for his group project and dissertation, and for testing concepts in supervisions).

The idea was to make you comfortable with the fundamentals and moving between technologies, and not be reliant on any particular set of tools. IMO, the contrasting concepts (Windows vs. Linux; functional vs. object-oriented; high-level vs. low-level; hardware vs. software) did this rather successfully. It didn't necessarily get you completely fluent in any particular language (you were largely expected to do this in your own time if it was a direction you wanted to pursue), but it did prepare you for jumping into pretty much any language/environment and getting up to speed quickly.

(There were also digital electronics and physics practicals in the first year, but they're a bit of a different thing)

[1] It gave you enough bash to run javac and manipulate files. There was a follow-up course the next year that went into a bit more depth on shell, and introduced make/Perl/LaTeX/MATLAB.

hota_mazi• 6 years ago

Ultimately, my core belief is this: Students need to know how to use computers before they can program them in a serious way.

Nonsense.

If we went this way, young people would get completely turned off from programming in the first hours.

Show them Python, Javascript, Scratch. Get them to display something on the screen, anything.

Get that spark.

And once they're hooked, now you can start showing them more details about the wonderful world they have just uncovered.

The author of this article needs to spend a solid five more years thinking about computer science and education because right now, her writing is just dangerously naive.

indymike• 6 years ago

The "stop using IDE _____ so that students can learn how the computer works" has been around since at least Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. In my own career, my toolchain seems to change radically every 3 years, and the transition time is measured in days to weeks. It's not that deep. Neither is bringing a new grad or new hire up to speed on whatever tools we're using.

I've worked with enough really good developers who were lost when not given an IDE. Most of the time, it takes a few days to teach "here's how to build at the command line" and here's how to use git (followed by the eventual day lost to finding a way to break git completely). The IDE centrism seems especially common in Windows and Java shops (and every Java shop I've worked with was using Windows).

rukuu001• 6 years ago

I mean, I get this.

I don’t think students should start with Eclipse - it’s a while learning curve on its own.

But they should definitely be familiar with it by the time they graduate.

0_gravitas4• 6 years ago

I think a better alternative would be "Don't Make Students Use Java", I seriously can't think of a worse language for training beginner/intermediate programmers, I certainly wish my schooling experience consisted of something else. From day one you're introduced to magic on top of magic: "Open up <IDE> and click 'new project' and name it 'MyProj' and now click on the file in the side menu that says 'MyProj' and inside `public static void main(String args[]){}` inside the `public class MyProj{}` write `System.out.println("Hello World")` and go to the top bar and hit 'Run' and then 'Hello World' will appear in the integrated console, ah, programming!"

And you don't even begin to grasp what all those steps you just took in the IDE did until you're at least 1+ years in, and you don't learn what all of those magic words even remotely mean by at least halfway into your second semester.

I felt like every single thing I ever did was magic, never having a clue why it ever actually worked the way it did, and as a result nearly dropped out. The only time things _finally_ started to make sense is when I got to Computer Architecture/Organization with MIPS followed by some work in C.

ardit33• 6 years ago

for very beginners, yes... Java is not the right programing language to teach. (I'd say Python is).

But for intermediate/advanced classes I think Java is a must learn for every CS graduate.

1. While it is bloated, it has so many modern and not so modern concepts into it, that learning it makes you understand those concepts better. (eg: It is hard to understand Generics if your favorite language doesn't have them)

2. A lot of enterprises (and major tech) backends still run on Java. I thin knowing it is a must to be competitive in the job market as a fresh grad

3. Learning Java (and probably disliking it) it will make you appreciate and perhaps make you better at learning other more nimble languages (aka. GoLang and friends)

0_gravitas4• 6 years ago

I don't particularly agree with the first two but I can WHOLLY agree on the third, in fact, I think I blame Java for my infatuation with FP

shadowCensor• 6 years ago

Python is perfect for learning programming logic.

Wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

bokwoon• 6 years ago

It’s kind of embarrassing but I didn’t understand generics from my beginner CS course (taught in Java). It wasn’t actively tested on either. I only began to appreciate it when I took an online MOOC in OCaml on a whim.

alialghamdi• 6 years ago

I'd like to stress on the second point. When I graduated at 2015, and have done multiple interviews with enterprises, Java or .NET were critical. Don't know if it's the same, but looking into job postings, I'd say it is.

It'd definitely different if you work for an IT company, but not always.

DeathArrow11• 6 years ago

Weird reason to promote something in CS courses.

CS programs aren't to let you make some easy money in the next few years. CS programs are to provide an thorough and high level of computing, from which writing code is just a small part. Having a CS degree much more than learning a language and framework.

If one's goal is just to earn some money in the next few years, he would be better served by taking an Udemy course.

University didn't teach me how to code, I did that myself before going to university. What it did teach was the why's and how's of computing without which I would be just a code monkey churning code without having a better understanding.

It is the same difference between someone who make an course learning how to repair electrical appliances and electronics and the engineer who designs them.

fishmaster6• 6 years ago

Go and nimble? Jesus christ, you can't be serious.

kdtsh2• 6 years ago

I really want to know what other languages large enterprises are using that have, or are on the track to getting, the kind of volume Java has. Especially languages that don't run on the JVM.

atomicpuffin• 6 years ago

Java is great for exactly that reason. It gives students an introduction to compilation, runtimes, stacks and heaps etc. Perhaps you had a poor learning experience due to who/what was teaching you rather than Java? My second comp sci course in college (first if you count high school AP credits), taught me all of this, and prepared me for the "full details" of MIPS and C.

0_gravitas4• 6 years ago

Learning C first would also introduce students to all of that as well, outside of the magic shell of Java and its tooling; get your compiler, get your text editor, and you are so much closer to the action. If I could have chosen what I started with I would likely have picked C, or possibly a LISP as well.

mumblemumble• 6 years ago

My main complaint about Java as a pedagogical language is that it's just so big, with so many complexities around semantics, compilation, runtimes, etc. So my fear is you end up spending as much time learning Java as you do learning how to build software. I wouldn't choose C# or C++, either. My sense, from working with others who came out of CS programs that relied on Java, is that they end up only really knowing how to work in Java, and therefore only really knowing their way around the ways of solving problems that come most naturally in Java.

It could be my chauvinism speaking. I'll admit to having some. My CS program taught us three relatively small programming languages (Scheme first, followed by C, and then MIPS assembly) in the first year before introducing OOP in the second year. So we ended up getting exposure to a variety of programming paradigms and environments, and came away with a lot of tools in our belt, and a fairly deep understanding of programming language theory and paradigms. And I did eventually find myself settled in a Java shop. When I did, I found that within only a couple months I had already developed a deeper understanding of the language than colleagues who had spent their entire careers working in it. And I believe a lot of that is because I had enough background knowledge to distinguish between, "This is how programming is done," and, "This is how programming is done in Java."

dralley• 6 years ago

The point is, it's a terrible first language because it's impossible to actually understand what's going on even in a basic "hello world" program until halfway through the semester. So inevitably you have to start them off by saying "here's a bunch of noise that you don't understand, but that's OK, just copy and paste it" which is a terrible habit to reinforce.

You need to understand

* access modifiers (public/private)

* classes

* static methods

* void return values

* the main() function

* modules (System.out.println)

Just to understand a basic "hello world". It's too much for first-time programmers.

matwood• 6 years ago

Seems like your complaint is against using IDEs early on and not Java. It's been awhile since my undergrad, but we used Java and text editor. We compiled with javac and ran the jars from the CLI.

0_gravitas4• 6 years ago

I consider the IDE's harmful magic don't get me wrong, and perhaps you were taught better than I was, but you still have classes and related incantations out of the gate (I would prefer a non-imperative language as an ideal starter, but I'd settle for a procedural over an OO)

grecy• 6 years ago

Same.

It wasn't until the final year of my 4 year Software Engineering degree I used an IDE for the first time (Eclipse, actually) and I was totally disoriented, not understanding how all the magic was happening.

kdtsh2• 6 years ago

Likewise. It hasn't been that long since I finished my undergrad (<5 years), and if I remember correctly, we didn't start using Eclipse until second year, and even then it was considered 'optional', i.e. as long as your code compiles and passes the test cases, it doesn't matter whether you use Eclipse, vim, Notepad, etc.

The upshot of this was that I didn't have a clue what Maven was until I started working, but you can learn tooling on the job.

kyriakos2• 6 years ago

I disagree with this as much as I dislike java I believe its a great language to teach someone object oriented programming. And you don't really need and ide at all, any text editor will do and will probably take away the complexity of learning the UI and help concentrate on what actual programming is. An IDE is really not needed to write your first algorithms as a student.

DeathArrow11• 6 years ago

But object oriented programming is gradually considered an antipattern by more and more people.

fishmaster6• 6 years ago

We're talking about computer science and not about enterprise programming. Object oriented programming is not the focus here.

kabacha• 6 years ago

Here's an anecdote - Java almost made me drop out. My university was teaching Java and it was absolutely awful experience. Me with my web 1.0 html/css and turbo pascal experience was blown away how awful "professional" programming was.

Then I found this new kid on the block Python and it was a completely different story. I fell in love with programming and hacking in general and finally at the end of the study I knew enough of python to bootstrap myself with Java which I still think is an abomination.

mekster2• 6 years ago

Not to mention those classes would make good programmer candidates start hate programming.

I can't imagine why people start teaching teens from C and Java and make them think programming is boring and annoying. Absolutely worse than not taking the class.

DeathArrow11• 6 years ago

What is boring and annoying in C? The only thing simpler than C is Basic.

lazulicurio6• 6 years ago

A lot of hate for Java in this thread. Just want to try to counterbalance it with some things that I, personally, like about Java.

1. Java enums

2. Java's generics, especially covariance/contravariance with wildcards (erasure really isn't as bad as people make it out to be)

3. Java's standard collections library

4. Java's method override rules (lets you extend return types on derived classes)

5. Default interface methods (.Net has them too now, but Java was first)

6. @Functional interfaces. They may seem a bit funny at first, but they are very useful (especially when combined with default interface methods)

29athrowaway3• 6 years ago

When you are teaching programming from first principles...

- portability is not a high priority.

- garbage collection is not a high priority.

Those are 2 reasons why you don't want to start with Java. You can teach it later, sure. But it's not a good start.

DeathArrow11• 6 years ago

I still feel like C# is a better Java. It has most of Java features, has other features, implemented important features before Java and it doesn't reach Java level of verbosity and bloatness.

cs02rm0• 6 years ago

My undergrad was a while ago, but we also did assembly and prolog first. The lecturer basically said assembler was almost to shock us into seeing how preferably the magic was. I still don't understand why prolog.

I struggled with the Java, but got my teeth into it on my own time to the detriment of my marks in other modules. Eventually it clicked enough, I got a degree and walked into a career where my skills have been in demand for 15 years. I'm pretty happy with that, I'd go so far as to say Java was by far the best part of the course for me.

DeathArrow11• 6 years ago

When I become a student in 1998 we used C and C++ for CS courses. C is simple enough of a language and low level enough to understand what your code does when running on the hardware.

Fast forward to 2 years ago, I did MsC at the same University and most courses were done using Java. I guess that's due to the long arm of Sillicon Valley.

Although Java was used for teaching material, the teachers allowed assignments in your language of your choice if the problem permitted. I did most of the assignments in C#. One I did in Java because I needed a powerful search tool and C# version of Apache Lucene was old. Other people used Java for assignments, one guy was using Python.

I have nothing against Java or using Java for teaching. I think it's better to use Java than Python since it has strong typing, enables parallel computing and it's faster being a compiled language.

However, I dread Java and I avoid it as much as I can. It feels verbose, boilerplate code is too much, it lacks some features. C# feels a lot cleaner. Even if it does have many libraries and enables you to target anything and do all kind of programming, it lacks the massive ecosystem of Java.

If someone would force me to choose between C++ and Java, I'd happily choose C++ if the task permits (i.e. I won't use C++ for web). And that says a lot since I am not very fond of solving the kind of bugs C++ almost guarantees you will have if the code is large enough. I'd rather solve C++ bugs than deal with the boilerplate and bloat and verbosity of Java.

That being said, I don't blame Java or people who designed Java and Java libraries. Allmost all old systems have their share of problems and Java is kind of old now.

Never programming languages and their ecosystems are solving some of Java's problems but if they will still exist in 20 years, we'll see they will bring their own baggage of problems.

I guess a perfect programming language is like an unicorn: we strive to catch it even if we know it doesn't exist.

What matters to me most these days is productivity, the speed something decent can be brought to market. By decent I mean something somewhat testable, somehow easy to understand in the future, somehow extendable and somehow maintainable.

There will always going to be trade-offs, making the right trade-offs based on the particular problem and resources is an art.

cygned• 6 years ago

I teach Java to first-semester students and I tried a couple of times to switch to another language because I think it’s not a good language to start with and because the students don’t like it either. However, the business (and we are a private university driven by businesses sending students) builds on two primary technologies: Java and COBOL. So even if I did teach another language, I would fail to prepare them for their careers in engineering.

What I do instead, though, talk about the architecture and backgrounds, show different ways and let them make the mistakes that help learn to solve problems.

topranks• 6 years ago

That’s not necessarily true though.

I was thought through Java but it was all command-line and jacvac.

I did once sort a much better programmers final year project for him though - years later that I worked with - cos he had a CLASSPATH issue. That did make me realise there are people thought the way you say that miss some of the basics.

kixiQu• 6 years ago

I'm laughing right now because ... I mean, I really thought this was going to be saying "Don't make students use Eclipse (because it's so inferior to the JetBrains tooling they'll use as professionals". My university had us in the command line plenty for C--that's no reason to pretend that that world has anything to do with how Java is written. It's the same "up by the bootstraps" 70s LARPing fantasy that makes people think that assembly will Teach Computational Thinking Skills that will somehow confer ability to handle distributed systems. If you want students to be able to come out able to effectively use tools, they have to come up using them.

shmerl• 6 years ago

Start without using any IDE.

Animats2• 6 years ago

"Software Build Processes" is now a field in its own right. There's not just a compiler. There's a build process, a dependency manager, a package manager, a source control system, tools for updating the files those use, etc. It used to be just "make", but now each language has some kind of package management system. Crates, wheels, eggs, containers, boxes inside of boxes - it's complicated.

This is all trade-school stuff, really. It's like learning how to wire electric power, with wire size, type, and color rules, fixtures, grounding, and in the US per the National Electrical Code. There's little academic content there; it's just a mass of detail. Not too hard if it's written down and the documentation is current. Which it won't be at many companies.

An argument against teaching the details in college is that students will need to know the one they're using in great detail. Knowledge about unrelated build systems doesn't transfer much.

Then there's the machine learning parallel universe, with notebooks and YAML.

NoraCodes13• 6 years ago

I basically agree with this. This is why, at the end of the post, I recommend Python in a Ubuntu environment, where the "build process" is a single step (`python my_program.py`), and packages can generally be managed with `apt`, which is a standard tool representative of a large class of tools, which are likely to be used at some point by a large fraction of CS students.

juped• 6 years ago

I think Python builds have gotten nearly as confusing as Java builds (judging by how every Python project these days wants me to use virtualenv).

therealdrag02• 6 years ago

I disagree that knowledge doesn’t transfer much. The commands don’t but the concepts do. I cut my teeth on Maven, then later was able to pick up a JavaScrip build system, and lately had to pick up a SBT. And I think my knowledge or at least wisdom has compounded. And those previous battles seem to have given me an upper hand or context that other coworkers sometimes lack.

29athrowaway3• 6 years ago

Java might not be the best first language to learn, but if you can't grasp Java as a college student, you won't survive the winter as a professional programmer.

Too• 6 years ago

Strongly disagree about the IDE part. At so many places I've been it's been the complete opposite problem. Most developers are using notepad++, or at best vscode without any plugins or custom config.

When you ask them to put a breakpoint somewhere you get a puzzled look back: "what's a breakpoint?".

They don't even know that debuggers exist!! Instead they add printf all over the place, recompile and rerun. Mind you these are people whose CV claim 5+ years of experience.

It's terribly ineffective. University should teach the fastest way to iterate logic, Being able to pause your code, introspect the data and then step through it slowly line by line is the best way to really understand and learn the theory of what is going on. Autocomplete is also a fantastic inspiration on what else that's possible to do that's not covered in your lab handouts.

How to import libraries and configure your build system will come later by necessity and will have changed by the time you start your next project. Knowing that debuggers exist and how to use them is a more general knowledge and it's something you have to be shown first before you miss it, (if Henry Ford asked what people wanted they would have said faster horses). Build systems and compiler flags can also be very challenging and uninspiring to understand before you even know what a linked list is. As someone else said below, after decades of experience i still have problems understanding the intricacies of CLASSPATH, or PYTHONPATH, ask a student to get this right and they'll just blindly copy-paste the first answer from stackoverflow so they can continue their printf-debugging session and finish their assignment before deadline.

oaiey• 6 years ago

Maybe eclipse is too much IDE. Maybe a advanced editors like VS Code hit the sweet point. The tasks infrastructure there - as bad as it is - will force you to understand details. It also has a terminal.

I do not understand the Java bashing. Python is nice, but it is an interpreter, does not compile, link or create executables. It misses so much in the compilation chain that it is neither a good language in the regard of this post.

C++ has all, but well, editors are crappy and pointers for a first lesson student are hard.

shean_massey• 6 years ago

My uni was nothing like this and I appreciate that. First year: every thing is terminal based, vim was taught, Javac was used by hand, as was nasm/ld/gcc. Only in the second year were we moved to netbeans and eclipse.

Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

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