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Java (along with XCode) is unique in that there are nicely-packaged IDEs that let you do professional-level coding just by downloading one program.

My first professional experience was in Java. I worked for a year for a startup, working on 3-4 different programs and doing the entire UI for their product. After 2 days trying to compile things with Notepad, one of the other devs suggested "Go use JBuilder, we have a site license", and I never looked back. I didn't have to touch the command-line once. I would hit "Run program" and my program would run. I'd select "Add library JAR" by right-clicking on the project file and selecting the library. I could check out files from the VCS with the SourceSafe plugin just by right-clicking on a file and selecting a menu item.

Then I got to college, and, as some unpaid volunteer work, tried to rewrite a quickly-growing Harry Potter fansite as a database-backed PHP webapp. And in the course of getting that to work, I had to learn all these crazy UNIX commands. I had to learn about CVS (this was before Subversion and git) and how its command-line worked. I had to learn vi, because that's what I had to edit files on the server. I had to learn how to unpack tarballs. I had to learn ssh and scp because our server-admin guy was like "No way in hell am I opening up telnet on this box." I had to learn Apache configs and PHP.ini and all sorts of other magic incantations.

I'm really glad I learned them - my Linux & vim skills have actually aged better than my Java skills have, and I use vim & UNIX commands every day now. But damn, it was a lot of bullshit when I just wanted to get some text up on a website.

I'm in my fourth year of a computer science degree, and there are students graduating with me in a few months who have never written code outside of eclipse.

They've even had us 'deploy' a website with filezilla. It obviously works well enough for the size of projects we were dealing with, but I can't help but be a little put off by how unfamiliar/uncomfortable most people (in most of my classes) are with the command line.

Very curious - what is the name of the school you're attending?

Nowadays I'd say "just use IDLE".

P.S.: Granted, it's not always going to be the best tool as a project grows, but it drastically lowers the barrier to one-off experiments and lessons.

> before we could get into any Python I had to explain all kinds of things I took for granted ...

It's possible to start writing Python without really knowing any of the things you list with an IDE like PyCharm -- which is probably a similar environment to the one they used for Java in "Computer Science."

It still too tricky to do things that make people, that don't know much about computers, excited about programming. Things like the C64, DOS or Qbasic were much "simpler" and of course the expectations were already lower. I would recommend something like Scratch or Processing instead.

Admittedly I didn't cut my teeth with C64 or DOS, but I have to imagine that it was only simpler because the barrier to entry was so much higher for those machines than it is today. And I would argue that expectations were higher in the past. Looking through some older 'entry level' computer science textbooks recently, I've been amazed at how complicated the material is and how quickly it covers things that we've only begun discussing as I'm about to graduate.

In those days, we also had magazines like Byte, Family Computing, Enter, etc. that included sections of type-in programs. My mom and I spent years doing that together!

I recall my high school computer science courses. They consisted of us writing stuff in DrJava, using a framework our teacher made to abstract some Java-specific things away. We ran the programs we made within it, without going into the command line. It was quite a simple IDE, but it allowed us to get things done without using a command line.

That's why it's nice to have online systems like my BlockPy [1], or Skulpt/Pythy/CodeMirror.

[1] http://blockpy.com

This is why I prefer Racket (and Dr Racket). It even comes with a great book: http://www.htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/ . Although I'm not really sure if the material / exercises there can really spark the imagination of a child, it is fairly accessible: unlike SICP, it doesn't assume knowledge of other advanced engineering and math topics.