When learning programming, it helps to isolate the programming tasks from system/deployment tasks. For example, I don't want to explain to a new student that they have to run chmod 755 on a bare-bones ruby program just to print “Hello World”. I don't want to spend an hour to set up the development environment. Those tasks can come later.

This page details some requirements for a development tool that Byteworks can use to teach the basics of programming.

Most important, the IDE must run reasonably well on older systems. This could eliminate some of the traditional/big name contenders such as NetBeans, Eclipse, etc.

• Linux compatible
• 256 MB of RAM
• Pentium 4 CPU or ~800+ MHz processor

Most of the professional IDEs are simply too much for a beginner to understand. Only the most basic programming functions need to be shown as buttons or menu items. (Save, Run, Compile, New, etc). Students need to concentrate on basic programming fundamentals, and not be distracted by the programming tool.

• Ideally, there should be a pre-packaged program in the repository, or a .deb file that we can use to install the program.
• If the student doesn't have Internet access, we should be able to put a .deb or setup file on their USB key that the student can take home to install on her computer.

• Ideally, a language such as Ruby, Python, or BASIC.

• It should be easy to create and run a program, and see the output with a few mouse clicks.

• It would be excellent to have debugging support, where the student could step through the program line by line, and see the values of the variables at run time by hovering their mouse over the variable, or setting up a watch list.
• Syntax Errors should be highlighted
• Compile Errors / Runtime Errors should be easy to decipher and navigate to.

• Fairly simple way to search a program or directory of programs for a word or wildcard search.

• Komodo - System requirements are 500 MB of memory, which technically eliminates it, but we haven't tried it yet.
  • http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/index.mhtml
• FreeRIDE - Stale project, but is being considered

• NetBeans
• Geany - This looks like it could be the answer.
  • Small footprint
  • Really simple interface, without hiding the basic commands like “Run”, “Save” and “Compile”
  • Actively developed project
• Gedit - Comes with Ubuntu, but you must install plugins to get features like “Run Program”, and to have a terminal/output window to see the results.