Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

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The debugger should be a concept to be taught, just like the compiler, linker, interpreter, assembler and so on. There should be at least a few lab hours where students are given existing programs and need to go for a bug hunt. This should include strace and valgrind, two essential tools that will probably not be outdated for quite a while.

Now, where I disagree is the IDE part. I have nothing against IDEs per se and I think everyone should be able to choose the tools he can work with best once (s)he starts a professional career. (hence why I like the concept behind cmake btw.). But I think it's a bad idea to start off with this as a student. An IDE comes along as an non separatable entity and it's hard to distinguish between the essential components behind it if that's the only thing you practice developing with. Students should learn what those components do from scratch and that's easier when you can see them as Lego bricks in front of you. IMO it's also a more satisfying learning experience than having MS, the Eclipse Foundation or anyone else holding the hand for you when you do your baby steps.

I see this as completely backwards. Tools like cmake are often worse for beginners because they have no idea how to understand them, and it involves learning another new language in addition to whatever programming language they're learning. Looking at something like Xcode or Visual Studio or Eclipse, where they can see "these are the source files that comprise my project," is much easier.

I do agree that learning the difference between the editor, compiler, the linker, and various other pieces is important, but I think there are better ways to do it than trying to understand the unix build tools right off the bat.

FWIW, my first exposure to all of this was in high school where we were taught Turbo Pascal on DOS. It was essentially a text-based IDE, but the teacher still taught us about the editor, the compiler, the linker, etc. and it made perfect sense. When I went to use the unix tools in college, it was quite confusing.

I think it's important to hit the ground running using the best tools available.

"Students should learn what those components do from scratch"

Yeah, they will eventually. When they take a compilers class, they'll understand how the compiler works. It's okay to have that be "magic" in the mean time. They should be focusing on learning about OO principles, and data structures, and algorithms and not futzing with command line tools.

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