Hi, I think the main point is that teaching with a REPL has some benefits not easily simulated by an IDE:
- It works like math in the sense that later lines of definitions are based on earlier ones. That's exactly what people still know from school and it gives them a familiar feeling. - It gives them a feedback at every step, for every single line and enforces them to solve a problem before moving on to the next. No "There are red squiggles, but let's ignore them, right?" This is a MASSIVE issue. - Earlier definitions and solutions are implicitly available and solve the problem of "should I define a new class for task A?"/"how can I use method B in both C and D"/... Compared to working in an IDE, - where even the installation can be painful and - doing basically anything requires them to first configure IDE specific stuff they neither understand nor care about at that moment - which encourages copy-and-paste behavior along the line, especially in less than modern languages like Java - which does way too much for an beginner Imho everything depends on the goals. *Do you want to teach concepts?* Stay away from IDEs until the concepts are understood. *Do you want to teach Eclipse?* Sure, go on, but please be honest about it. I have seen to many "text processing courses" which more or less were instructions on how to find some menu entry in Microsoft Office 2003, while 95% of the participants lacked _any_ idea of concepts like "where to use headings/bold/italic/different fonts"/"how to use quotation marks"/"what's the purpose of footnotes"/"how to decide on consistent style guidelines"/... Teaching with an IDE feels a bit like those office courses, because people are basically bound to spend most of their time fighting with IDE-related problems and issues. In the end I think languages without a stand-alone REPL/interpreter/... lack some important tooling. Some languages are not that REPL-friendly, but even C# has one. So I think there aren't much excuses except laziness. In the end I think JavaScript has some nice properties as a first language, but also suffers from the issues as PHP does: Most of the existing code out there is just horribly outdated, wrong, or often both and as a teacher you don't want your students to look at it. Teaching JavaScript without internet access though, sounds very weird. Bye, Simon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/javaposse/-/A0r_I-0Hc8YJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
