Replying from GG....   WTF is that imprinting business about  :-)

I'm seeing a trend in the IT/IS industry that seems to be heading
towards simplicity.  Rather than using
elaborate websites to convey information, we have an abundance of
wiki's which both present information and allow
for collaboration....  While MS seems to be making things more
complicated, I don't see things going that way for people who
are working with code on a day-to-day basis.  While IDE's make things
easier, I've heard on many occasions that for someone starting to
learn a new language (i.e., Java) it's better to start with the
basics, a text editor and a commandline.

Unfortunately, it is often essential to use an IDE (ie. Matisse for
Swing apps in Netbeans) for the simple reason that it would take x
times as long to
a) learn how to write the code
b) actually write the code and get it to work

With an IDE like Matisse, you are basically guaranteed to have a
working app, until you start adding things to the base system... but I
digress

I took two courses in Java Programming at our local community college
and for some reason, the instructor had us using Eclipse rather than a
command line.  So our ability to succeed in the course was partially
based on being able to use the IDE.  IMHO this is a bad move.  To
learn a language, one needs to start at the basics.  For someone like
me who came from a command line environment, to be suddenly thrust
into an IDE environment was something of a culture shock.

This is why I am going back to basics (not the language), hence my
question.  I apologize if this has been discussed and argued before,
but over time, people's opinions do differ so the editor of choice for
Joe Q. Public 2 years ago may not be the same today.

On Jun 23, 7:56 am, Roedy Green <see_webs...@mindprod.com.invalid>
wrote:

My Fellow Canadian... I respectfully disagree.  Already, after only 1
week away from the IDE world, I have learned much that I did not
know.  By employing ant to do my compiles and builds and emacs to edit
code, I have learned more about classpaths than I did before.  You
see, my ant build.xml compiles into ../build  So if I have a class
Widget.java which creates an instance of fooBar, the fooBar.class has
to be on the classpath, or Widget.java will not compile.  In the IDE
world, all of this was taken care of for me.  While it may not have
taught me about layouts and methods, the knowledge I have gained on
the inner workings will be valuable in the future.