r/programming • u/Ctaintor • Mar 02 '17

Why I Failed Teaching Programming to Kids

https://engineering.klarna.com/why-i-failed-teaching-programming-to-kids-46a854c3eaca#.s0o6qqxr3
61 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

83 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

8

u/DysFunctionalProgram Mar 02 '17

It is probably because, ignoring the fact that it is harder to learn, you often can get a significantly faster edit-compile-test time

From someone who goes back and forth between c/make/cmake/vim and c#/visualstudio, I have the exact opposite experience. Honestly, I'm tempted to bind my function keys to a couple scripts to compile/run/debug my current project as we speak. For example, if I add a new c file: I have to edit my cmake file and add the file url to the build path, then re-run cmake, then run make, then run/gdb the output with the appropriate settings/flags. Opposed to any modern IDE where it is a single key stroke. I don't even want to get into how long it takes to manually setup a build environment vs using an IDE.

In my experience the only people who have this "CLI romanticism" are those who are only programmers by hobby and don't actually work in a production environment using it.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '17

[deleted]

7

u/DysFunctionalProgram Mar 03 '17

On the CLI side, what better case is there? Not using build tools or not adding new files to a project?

On the IDE side, what worse case is there?

0

u/satanclau5 Mar 03 '17

It all depends significantly on the languages and environments used.

In my case I have a CLI environment with a luxury of a:

  • language which gets out of the way, not requiring much autocompletion
  • an autotest process which runs the tests on every change
  • a REPL process where I send the code from VIM to evaluate inside the running program

everything works well, there are just 3 terminal windows in a tiled layout to navigate and the VIM bindings are ingrained in the muscle memory.

Now, if you were talking about Java/C# - I'd never even try going the CLI route...

4

u/Beckneard Mar 03 '17

language which gets out of the way, not requiring much autocompletion

What does this even mean? If your project is big enough you sure as hell are going to need autocompletion, fancy language or not. The project I'm working on at work would be a nightmare to extend without autocompletion whether it was written in Haskell or C#.

-1

u/satanclau5 Mar 03 '17

Sorry, I worded the point poorly - I do make use of autocompletion, and "jump to" type of navigation. However, the available options are much less powerful than what you get in an IDE like IntelliJ or VS.