Unrelated image from pexels.com to make this post look nicer in social media shares.
Unrelated image from pexels.com to make this post look nicer in social media shares.

In college our first Java classes used a text editor (TextPad), not a full featured IDE like Eclipse, and compiled and ran our programs from the command line. When we finally started using Eclipse, I was kind of pissed off that we’d spent so much time slowly and painfully debugging our code when Eclipse could’ve just told us exactly where the problem was. Knowing what I know now, I totally understand why our teachers did it that way, but I don’t remember anyone doing a particularly good job of explaining it at the time.

For anyone out there wondering why on earth they have to do things the hard way when they could just use a tool that makes things so much easier, the answer is that the tool doesn’t actually make things easier.

It sure seems like it does once you’ve got the basics of coding down, but until then it’s just another complication that you really don’t need when you’re already trying to learn something extremely complicated. Take this question I found on reddit for example: you can have perfectly good code but be unable to run it because your IDE isn’t configured correctly. IDEs are powerful tools, and any powerful tool can hurt as much as it helps. If you already know how to write code, compile it, keep track of your files and build path and everything, then IDEs are great. If you try to learn all those things plus how to use an IDE, how to set it up, and how to recognize and fix problems with your configuration if you mess something up all at the same time, you’re going to have a bad time.

You know how your teacher always said to add one a thing at a time when you’re writing code so that you know what caused it if something breaks? That counts for tools, too. If you’re not already good at tracking down what’s wrong with your code, you’ll have a terrible time figuring out whether your code is actually wrong or whether your IDE isn’t configured right.

IDEs can also hide stuff from you that you actually will want to learn, even if it’s a pain while you’re learning it. With java in particular, an IDE can make it seem like you just write code and it runs by magic. That’s not helpful once you start working on projects that need to be run outside of the IDE. You will need to know how to compile your code, what settings you need to get the right output, where that output ends up, and how to use/deploy the compiled code, none of which you’ll learn by hitting the run button in Eclipse.

I can even see the point, as infuriating as it was at the time, of making students manually find issues like missing semicolons without the help of an IDE. The level of attention to detail you learn by finding your own missing semicolons is absolutely necessary to track down the kind of subtle logic errors an IDE can’t help you with. I don’t believe there’s any way to learn that without spending a lot of time being very very frustrated, but it’s an extremely useful skill and one that every programmer will need sooner or later.

If there’s a better (and less frustrating) way to learn to program I’d love to hear it, but I’d be very surprised if there’s a non-frustrating way to learn a fundamentally frustrating skill.