[ jEdit-users ] jEdit / education / world domination (long)

[Greg W. <Gre...@ba...>]

Hi, everyone.  I'm very much a newcomer to the jEdit world, but I
would like to talk with interested parties about what could be done to
make it more attractive to educators---in particular, about making it
a "must-have" tool for first- and second-year college courses.  I feel
very strongly that doing this would greatly increase jEdit's user base
long-term, since students tend to stick to the tools they like after
they graduate.

The background to all of this is that most CS programs do a poor job
of teaching students the craft of programming.  After a first-year
intro to Java, and the second-year course on data structures and
algorithms, most students go straight into courses on computability,
databases, graphics, and so on.  Except for a few scattered lectures
on systematic debugging or version control, most students have to
teach themselves how to build non-trivial programs.  As a result, most
students never learn how to drive industrial-strength programming
tools.  For example, I estimate that fewer than one in three seniors
use a debugger as a matter of course.  Even fewer use an IDE, despite
the fact that student licenses for CodeWarrior and the like are very
inexpensive.

This is where jEdit comes in.  Students can ignore just about every
other tool they're shown, but they have to learn how to drive an
editor in order to write programs.  If they were to learn jEdit, then
instructors could add its IDE capabilities piecemeal, without students
ever being overwhelmed (as they often are when shown Visual Studio,
CodeWarrior, or the like all at once).

Instructors could of course do this with other high-powered editors,
especially emacs.  However, jEdit has something that those other
editors don't: a plugin component architecture.  Second- and
third-year courses on OO design and software engineering could
therefore take plugins apart to show students how the tools they're
using work, and have students build plugins in assignments as a way of
learning---really learning---how big programs are put together.  I
think this would be a very effective way to show students the power of
tool-based programming, componentry, and the like.  What's more, this
could trigger a positive feedback loop, since people who have learned
the in's and out's of jEdit as an example of a component-based system
would be very likely to build plugins for it.

So, how do we get from here to there?  First, I don't think jEdit
needs more plugins, at least not right now.  Instead, it needs better
versions of the plugins it already has.  The four capabilities that an
IDE has to offer are project management, build management, debugging,
and version control.  jEdit has plugins for the first three, and
GruntSpud promises the fourth, but they all need a lot of work before
they are student-ready.  (The one exception I might make to this is
the addition of a read-eval-print plugin, to allow novices to explore
simple Java statements in the way DrJava does.  I know BeanShell can
be used for this, but its syntax is different enough from Java to
cause confusion in young minds.)

Second, while jEdit has a much smaller footprint than full-blown Java
IDEs like Forte or Ecipse, it still runs slowly on typical student
machines.  I think that jEdit needs to focus on performance (both
speed and memory usage) even more than it does already.  It's no good
saying, "Well, but in a year or two, machines will be twice as fast."
Most university labs are always going to be populated by machines that
are three or four years old; if jEdit is written with single-user
state-of-the-art hardware in mind, it will always be slow on the
lower-end machines of the day.

Third, jEdit's internals need to be documented well enough for second-
and third-year students running a "B" average to build plugins without
heroic effort.  The existing User's Guide is very well written, but
telling students to go and wade through tens of thousands of lines of
Java source with only a vague high-level description of the EditBus as
a guide is simply a non-starter.  I think this will happen on its own
once a few instructors decide to adopt jEdit; I would certainly be
willing to do a big chunk of this, if I believed that jEdit was going
to deliver the other things I need.

So, there you have it, a complete plan for world domination ;-).  As I
said at the outset, I'd like to hear from anyone who'd be interested
in seeing it through.

Thanks,
Greg Wilson
Doctor Dobb's Journal


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