After a year plus of having written this, I'm finally seeing his view become more and more mainstream. Heartening!
https://twitter.com/o_guest/status/842794088315404288 …
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The metaphor only stretches a certain amount. But I think it's a basic pedagogical point.
I'm with, I believe, @.worrydream and probably @.EdwardTufte and maybe Alan Kay – I think most of our cognitive potential comes from the cognitive tools we use. IDEs are _cognitive tools_, as much as algebra, group theory, or knowing logical fallacies.
They're not a crutch any more than algebra is. I'd go as far as to say society and the cognitive tools it grants us are what distinguishes us from "prehistoric" humans. The hardware's barely changed. But the tools make us more.
And this is why I am very frustrated with the tooling that exists around contemporary software engineering. I think it's extremely poor, and an enormous hinderance to our abilities.
So – I'm not a Matlab user, and it may well be a dreadful IDE! There are lots of poor cognitive tools out there that lead us astray and stop us thinking well (eg, powerpoint & pi charts). But cognitive tools themselves, and IDEs in principle, are not the problem. IMHO.
And also – I do agree that you might get some benefit / insight from forgoing powerful cognitive tools (eg, algebra) for a while to see what happens. But I don't think it's generally good advice.
Any more than wearing boxing gloves to play violin, or walking in concrete boots, or painting a wall with a toothbrush, or using imperial is going to be broadly educational. It might be an interesting experience though.
Incidentally, as a counter argument, I did not a single time correctly spell "cognitive" in the above without my spell checker first putting a nice red line under "cognative". So that might be a crutch for me ;-)
I dunno, I think if someone put training wheels on my bike I’d hurt myself 
That could still count as learning. 
I’ve had colleagues see similar things try to get students to write a program in bare python after teaching them for a term in Jupyter. It was not pretty!
*nods* … I get that there's a real world out there where programming in bare Python is a useful skill. I'm challenging that this is a good thing though. I anticipate we'll put that behind us at some point, and that will be a good thing.
I guess conceptually, I can see where you are coming from, but I disagree and I'll try to explain. I think if we take this away from the quite reasonably emotive argument about expensive tools we can see other environments where the IDE is intimately tied into the language used.
In the early days of BASIC on a microcomputer, this was certainly true. We wrote code in an integrated environment with a line editor, a debugger etc. and indeed on many platforms the programs weren't even stored as plain text.
(sorry, thanks twitter I've broken the threading, see here https://twitter.com/owainkenway/status/10173361982626734080 …)
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