[sigint-ninja]

i have been reading that a lot of people recommend a text editor instead of eclipse or intelij or another IDE

do you really agree with this?

should i use notepad++ or sublime text or something

or is it really not that important?

thnks

[NormR]

The recommendations that I've seen are for beginners to use a simple editor and use the commandline for compiles and executions. The reason is to get an understanding of how classpath works with the javac and java commands.
There must be lots of tutorials explaining this better.

[horace]

IDEs such as NetBeans and Eclipse are fine for building large projects
I tend to use DrJava for single file programs and small projects
http://www.drjava.org/

if has the advantage that you don't have to create a project for a single file program such as "hello world"

[xiledcore]

I think starting out with an IDE is completely fine. If you're just starting to learn how to program, it might be less complicated than working from the command line for some. However, like NormR said, it might be a good idea to use the command line just to learn how it works.

[cfoley]

Whenever I pick up a new language, my preference is to use a text editor and the command line. That's what I did with Java, and because of this I have a fairly good understanding of the process of compiling, deploying and running a Java program. I can use this understanding to reason about what the tools are doing. This is especially handy when things go wrong.

Contrast this with C#, which is a very similar language. I jumped straight into using Visual Studio. While I can write C# programs no problem, I don't really know how the tools work. The best I can do is guess based on my experiences with other languages. It has me reaching for google a lot more often than if I were programming in Java.

[sigint-ninja]

thanks guys!!!

[jon.kiparsky]

I absolutely recommend a text editor - preferably emacs or vi - particularly for the beginner. Using an editor forces you to learn a lot of details that the IDE takes care of for you, and forces you to think about the basics. Obviously, the best time to think about basics is when you're starting out.

Later on, you might consider using an IDE, but honestly I've always found they more of an impediment than a help.

[sigint-ninja]

so you code java apps on linux?
or do you use vim for windows?

how is java coding on linux anyway...good environment?
thought python was more suited for linux

[CasiOo]

My teacher coded his own IDE and compiler, which hid away that had to do with classes etc. It was very easy to start with Java, when you could write simple code like

int num1 = 2;
int num2 = 10;
int result = num1 + num2;

No classes, no methods

His compiler of course had classes too, but that was first introduced at a later stage when we were ready for it.
So basically his home written compiler made it possible to learn little bits at a time, and you weren't thrown in the world of OOP etc.

This post has been edited by CasiOo: 29 June 2016 - 01:04 PM

[jon.kiparsky]

sigint-ninja, on 29 June 2016 - 02:19 PM, said:

so you code java apps on linux?
or do you use vim for windows?

how is java coding on linux anyway...good environment?
thought python was more suited for linux

For my day job, I write django on a mac, deployed to a linux box on an AWS server. (so basically, the standard setup )

Java on linux is fine. Really, if you think about it, you can't get a more integrated development environment than linux. That's what it was built to be from day one!

[Charan_Zack]

Generally when someone is starting any programming language it is recommended to use simple notepad apps as they tend to keep things simple with simple language and user friendly environment and so on and now a days we are using notepad++ as a standard text editor as it got some cool features like highlighting the text or the code in this code according to the keywords and all and so the answer is clear go for a text editor if you want to keep things simple and something like an eclipse if you like it the hard way.