From: Kevin Smith <sent@...>
Date: 2001-02-09T01:45:33+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:10589] Re: book review?

>Cutting your teeth on hand coding is not such a bad idea when you are tyring 
>to learn something new. The downside to "really friendly" IDE's is that they 
>often hide a lot of the basics of which one should really develop a pretty 
>thorough understanding. IDE's arte really the icing on the cake...once you 
>learn how to survive 'in the wild' so to speak, then learn the IDE to be 
>maximally productive.

I've heard this many times and still don't buy 
it. I agree that to really become an expert 
programmer you have to dig deep and understand 
what's going on under the covers. But to learn 
enough about programming to be able to throw 
together some utilities or games, it's not 
necessary.

I think the environment should be as invisible as 
possible early on, to allow students to focus on 
the concepts (OO), and then the language.

Poor analogy time: We don't expect people to 
learn to drive on cars that have a hand-crank 
starter, manual transmission without synchro-
mesh, manual choke, etc. We probably don't want a 
student driver's first session behind the wheel 
to be in Manhattan rush hour, or doing top speed 
on the autobahn. A quiet side street is 
challenging enough.

Kevin