Kathy Sierra recently posted an interesting blog entry that asks: Are our tools making us dumber? This debate rages in the IDE world all the time, especially amongst folks who teach.

Last year when Geertjan and I were doing presentations for the folks who are certified to teach Sun's Java training courses we frequently heard complaints about how the use of the NetBeans IDE in the lab exercises would result in students who do not know how the technology really works. For what it's worth, I don't think that always has to be the outcome - and there are several of the instructors who agree (for an interview with one, see this).

I don't deny for a moment the idea that if you get hooked on just using a particular tool and ignore the fundamentals then you can eventually end up in dire straits. But there are several ways to avoid this problem - the first being one mentioned in that blog entry: start doing your learning without a tool. And in fact that is the technique used in Sun's Java courses - the IDE is only used in the labs. The classroom instruction is where the technology is taught. Properly used, a good IDE is a productivity tool, not a crutch.

Beyond that, Ms. Sierra suggests to tool makers: "If you make a tool that's hiding things the user should understand, maybe you could provide a tutorial or even an understanding mode where the user can ask the tool exactly what it's doing and how it made the decisions it made." Seems like an "understanding mode" might be difficult to implement in the automatic transmission of a car. :-) But with Java IDEs these things are a bit more achieveable.

There are several features in the NetBeans IDE that I think help prevent people from becoming so dependent on it that they do not know what is really going on. Some of them are listed below.

1. Transparency. The default project system for the NetBeans IDE is based on Ant. All project information is kept in plain-text files. So there are no proprietary binary formats to worry about.
2. A physical view of the project. IDEs like to display a logical "project view" of your stuff and the NetBeans IDE is no exception. This is nice and everything, but you need a physical view of exactly what is happening in the file system. So if you want to know exactly what sorts of files the IDE added with one of its wizards you can easily open the Files view.
3. Integrated help for the tool and the technology. For example, if you open up the help file in the NetBeans IDE while using something like the nice editor it provides for a web.xml file, you get help on not only the IDE's editor features but also on what web.xml is all about, what it contains, etc.
4. Tutorials that cover not only the tool, but also the technology.
5. Diagnostic tools. As mentioned above, the project system is based on Ant. If things are not going well with the IDE generated build script, there is an Ant debugger included so that you can easily look around and see what is going on.