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0 pointsZergy10y ago0 comments

> I think it's much simpler to learn 10 commands in the terminal and use text files than try to grasp what's going on in an IDE.

This is true IMO. However you don't need to understand what the IDE is doing to use it now do you? A new user needs to learn nothing more than how to use the project creation wizard, and hit the play/stop button button.

As someone who teaches high school children how to program I assure you from experience and an IDE is much, much simpler than diving into the terminal.

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learning_still10y ago

But that's the point. I didn't need to understand 10 commands in the terminal to run the application. A very small barrier. What IDE's did was create a huge barrier between me and all the other programmers. If something broke or I needed to learn something new, it was all in the context of this magical black box. I wasn't learning how to use my computer. I was learning how to use someone else's program. I could get from point A to point B without knowing what was going on, but ultimately that just caused a lot of frustration. How long would it actually take you to teach a student to compile and run a program written in C?

This example requires the user to be able to do the following that an IDE would not:

- copy paste a file path to the terminal

- cd [pasted filepath]

- make [file name]

- ./[filename]

http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ex1.html

Versus throwing them into a black box where they are overwhelmed with buttons and gizmos and are encouraged to give up on the idea that they will ever know what's going on. Do you honestly think it's not worth the time to teach students how to use the terminal?

douche10y ago

Then you have to learn how to write makefiles, which means you need to learn at least a little bit about gcc.

Oh, you're on Windows (like 90+% of normal computer users), well there's this thing called Mingw, or you can use Cygwin, which you use in this thing called a command-prompt, which you've probably never used before. Oh, and make sure you have your PATH environmental variables setup correctly. What's an environmental variable?

It's all turtles. Much easier to open Visual Studio, add a project, type out a main method, and hit compile & run. It's a shame QBasic isn't around by default anymore, limited as it was. Which, come to think of it, was a stripped-down, basic IDE.

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