My colleagues and I have been discussing recently if we should use Positron IDE as a common environment for teaching R and Python. Emacs is another option, of course.
I'm in an MBA program and in my data science course (aimed at non programmers obviously) the prof used R and Rstudio.
At first I thought it was a bad choice, and I did all my assignments with Emacs/ESS. I preferred it, as I do almost all my coding in emacs and of course it's easy to define custom shortcuts to insert the un-ergonomic R operators like the magrittr pipe. But I came to realize that the way Rstudio is self-contained, and oriented around "sessions", or notebook-style code, makes it easier for neophytes to pick up.
I can't imagine how difficult it would be to teach a bunch of non programmers how to deal with python given the insane situation with venvs, pip vs homebrew, and 2 vs 3, imports, etc.
This semester is my first using Posit Cloud. It removes the headache whether you're teaching R or Python. The only thing I've found annoying is the need for students to install their own packages.
I ran my own RStudio Server on Digital Ocean for years. That worked very well, with students not needing to install packages, but maintaining things myself created more work for me.
Before that I had to deal with an unending string of support for the students using their own computers. I would never go back to that again.
I used Cocalc once during the pandemic. It has a great set of features, but the students found the interface confusing.
I think it depends on how new your students are to programming. If they are already coding and have their favorite IDE then it would be nice to force them to try something new to see a different workflow (even if they end up going back to vscode later).
On the other hand for newer programmers you want to focus less on the tools, installation and workflow and more on just getting them programming. In that situation the batteries included environments like RStudio would be preferred.
Another practical thing to think about is how much you and your TAs want to wrestle with installation issues vs just giving them a web based notebook environment like Colab.
I love Emacs, but I think it would be challenging to teach an intro programming course using it these days. (We landed on VSCode for teaching Python.)
The basics of Emacs are not that hard. One of my introductory freshman courses taught us XEmacs in parallel, as we went through Lex & Yacc.
Basically you need to learn a few basic movements, which are also really useful on any terminal thanks to GNU Readline, and a some basic concepts like the minibuffer, interactive commands, etc. From there onward, things are quite easy to discover little by little, especially with newer packages like vertico, marginalia or which-key.
Obviously, its much harder than VSCode, but investing on Emacs is IMHO worth the effort if one values stability. It will be probably still relevant when most competing solutions are gone. Plus, it offers great support for lots of niche languages and workflows, like Org.
> Basically you need to learn a few basic movements, which are also really useful on any terminal thanks to GNU Readline
This is one of the biggest reasons why I’m slowly switching to Emacs for most of my editing needs. Those movement keyboard shortcuts are ubiquitous on UNIX family operating systems. They even work in most native text editing fields in macOS and iOS.
I agree, having a subset of Emacs/Readline keybindings available everywhere on macOS is really convenient and made Emacs quite natural to use for me.
GNOME used to have an Emacs GTK key theme, but it is no longer available as of GTK 4.0?