On Fri, 2007-09-14 at 17:45 +0100, Roshan wrote:
List,
Terms used: IDE: Integrated Development Environment CS: Computer Science IT: Information Technology
I was thinking about this for sometime now, and realized, that there wasn't any emphasis on the "tools" being used in courses (graduate, postgraduate) (CS and IT).
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IMO, it's never the tools that decide how good a programmer you turn out to be. It's the almost always the training you get (even when you are learning by your self.)
You can always argue one way or the other about whether tools help or hinder you. On the one hand having some details hidden may help you get over part of the learning curve. On the other, if you get dependent on buttons, you'll never know what's happening behind the scenes.
If I were doing the teaching (and I have done some :), I'd ask the students to learn without the extra help and then once they've got a hang of the ropes to start using the helps and tools. That way, the student has some clue about what happens when they click on a button or why a certain bit of code is marked red by the syntax highlighter.
-gabin