Comment by kristianp
6 months ago
It's funny that students in the early 90s would use a pirated copy of turbo C or pascal, but in the early 2000s when Java took over curriculums, students couldn't access a decent IDE. Many never saw a debugger in action, and executed javac in a dos window.
That sounds unlikely. AFAIK both Eclipse and Netbeans have had pretty good debuggers since the early days, probably around 2002ish.
The 2nd year students I interacted with weren't aware of those and they weren't available in the PC labs at the university. I think there was something called BlueJ IDE as a learning tool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueJ
That sounds like a teaching problem instead of a tooling problem.
Snark aside, I think there's value in teaching the basics first (e.g. compiling stuff with javac) before moving on to using magic to hide the complexity.
I recall using Eclipse 2.x in the mid 2000s and it was good, although not fast.
IntelliJ was already awesome in the early 2000s.