From: Curt Hibbs <ml.chibbs@...>
Date: 2006-06-13T00:23:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for Highschoolers?

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On 6/12/06, Keith Fahlgren <keith@oreilly.com> wrote:
>
> On Sunday 11 June 2006 7:33 pm, Timothy Hunter wrote:
> > > For student just starting to learn a language, a good IDE would
> > > help greatly.
> > >
> >
> > All right, I'm listening. How would an IDE help?
>
> Well, if you're learning to program in Scheme and hear everyone say "Ew,
> I can _never_ figure out those damn parens,"[1] you can give them a
> real IDE so that they essentially never have to worry about the parens
> again (see DrScheme or vim with proper syntax highlighting and %), nor
> do they need to learn how to use a more advanced editor.
>
> Now, if you're learning programming in Ruby, an IDE may not be as
> important, but it's probably useful to remove as many barriers to entry
> as possible--you want the kids to be learning the language, not :wq or
> CTRL-X CTRL-C.


The navigation tree that shows the ffile's contents (modules. classes,
methods)  that you get with most IDEs is very useful to be able to see the
structure of the software at a glance. This is very helpful to beginners and
experts, alike.

Curt

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