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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

> I'd assume you are not working in education?

Not right now, but I did.

> But as a teacher, you have a completely different problem: You need a really simple, easy to explain environment - no fuss, no unnecessary complexity.

Just tell them to ignore that complexity and only press this and this.

When I was a kid we were taught to code (simple games in C/WinAPI and C++/MFC) in Visual Studio 6 Enterprise Edition on Windows NT. Visual Studio (especially its enterprise editions) traditionally has tons of features which still seem extraterrestrial to me but you are safe to ignore them.

Just don't click those weird menu/toolbar items. Just create a project, write the code (with help of super-smart auto-completion) and press Run, use some conveniences (like refactoring and debugging) once you are told or read about those particular. Easy-peasy.

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>Just tell them to ignore that complexity and only press this and this.

You have used 3 "just do this" kind of statements in this comment. I would not like to be in your class. Students should be encouraged to explore, and its a teacher's responsibility to create an environment where its fun and valuable and not frustrating. This is why newtonian mechanics is taught before quantum and quantum mechanics before quantum field theory. Once a person is familiar with one abstraction you drill down. I know all this is hard, but if it was easy everyone will just teach themselves. The whole point of having a teacher is someone who can setup a protective bubble around you when learning.

Just because you learned using a more complex tool doesn't mean it wouldn't be easier for most students to learn using a less complex tool. It just means learning with a complex tool is possible. I don't think anyone would argue against that. They're just arguing it might be easier the other way around.

“Here’s something that isn’t meant for your use case, but just ignore most stuff”

Vs.

“This does exactly what you want”

Of course, there are advantages to learning with the same tool you could also go on to use professionally.

I'm surprised that you find Vim unintuitive elsewhere and talk about "just" creating a project in VS.

VS projects in the IDE are one of the most convoluted development ways I've ever seen.

Students won't learn anything except developing Stockholm Syndrom for a bloated proprietary environment.

If it must be Windows, I'd rather teach cl.exe and Makefiles or adapted .vsproj files with msbuild.

> I'm surprised that you find Vim unintuitive elsewhere and talk about "just" creating a project in VS.

Just go to the "File" menu, Click "New project" there, choose the type (a console app or a GUI app), enter the name and press Ok. The teacher shown us when I was a kid and nobody found this difficult. Of course, we never cared (until grown up and started to care about versioning) about the auxiliary files the IDE created to accompany the code in the project - understanding those never happened to be a necessity.

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