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Comment by Stormbringer | Hacker News Reader

By "readily available at the command line" - have you forgotten that the context of this discussion is for a language to use for a first year programming course?

A not insignificant portion of the people taking those courses will not be command line savvy.

Also, I think that the fascination some programmers have for tools that are cumbersome and difficult to use is unhealthy.

The tool should not itself be the problem.

The tool should be a force multiplier that lets you solve other problems more easily.

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Well whatever the language you want to use, you'll have minor installation/configuration to do. For real beginners, the teachers can do it for them. So, if they use Eclipse for instance, the IDE can be configured to automatically use JSlint.

By "Command line", the OP meant that it's easy to plugged it wherever you want it; i.e. it is not strictly an online tool.

About:

  "fascination some programmers have for tools that are cumbersome and difficult to use is unhealthy"

Not sure what you're thinking about. It's more an opinion than a fact. I.e. Some programmers like emacs better than vim, some prefer Eclipse.. some prefer notepad++. "Cumbersome and difficult" mostly depends of your taste and your background.

Is 'grep' hard to use? What about ctrl+shift+f in Visual Studio? Which one is the most cumbersome and difficult to use? Highly subjective imo.

No. I am operating under the assumption that a competent instructor would provide a pre-configured text editor or IDE for the students to use.

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