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Not the OP. When I started out I took a conscious decision to stay away from IDE'S.

an IDE adds complexity when the main goal should be to learn to program. An IDE has a bunch of features you need to learn and understand when learning to program by itself is hard enough.

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What language did you use?

Python.

Python is, possibly because it originated as a scripting language, very amenable to non-IDE development. In general, my experience is that the less statically-typed a language is, the less essential IDEs are.

That is a language that is perfectly fine to start without an IDE but for example Java and C# are pretty much designed to use with an IDE, at least when you are building something that is non trivial.

You don't have to use all the power but letting for example Visual Studio handle the project references and build for a .NET project will allow a beginner to focus on coding. Not to mention all the tutorials will assume they use Visual Studio.

I had a feeling it would be something along those lines. When I began I actually started with Java and later dabbled with C# but didn't get far with either one of those. I had no idea what I was doing. I probably still don't ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I finally settled on Python after jumping around quite a bit and am still learning.

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