Uber,
Steve, is that you???
While you definitely can use
notepad, find me a company on earth that does that given today's IDEs and I will find you a company on the verge of bankruptcy because they never deliver anything on time (or error-free). As I said before, programming is not about learning to type or specific syntaxes, it is about structure, code reusability, and basic coding constructs like looping, conditionals, and the like. Today's IDEs are more fun to use, prevent silly errors (most of the time
) and allow you to code things pretty quickly, thereby allowing you to do more in less time. For a person looking to learn coding casually I strongly recommend these. Since these folks arent looking for full time jobs, I would use the IDEs (but I recognize that typing things out longhand and making mistakes will probably reinforce coding more strongly, if you don't quit out of frustration. To appease both sides, code Hello World by hand if you can in
notepad++ or
textpad and then take off the training wheels and hop into
Eclipse or
VS. The only people who continue to write large amounts of code in notepad either a.) code in a terribly cryptic language designed for ultra-high efficiency (and there simply are no good IDEs for these ..... assembler) or b.) they are stuck in the dark ages and refuse to open their eyes to the great tools now available that do permit the flexibility of intelli-sense as well as coding by hand. There is no doubt that IDEs add some overhead to code, but they really do decrease coding time. The basic principles of coding must be applied either way and that is what you should focus on learning no matter how you do it.
-Rick