Thats a different argument, and a much stronger one.

"Universities should offer a class on comparative programming languages and language tooling." is much different than "Intro-to-programming classes should not have a strongly-recommended IDE"

I was referring to the second part of his post. Also this class is not introduction to programming it is upper division and considered one of tougher classes in terms of workload.

The assignments aren't trivial. Take look at them:

http://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring20/cs131/homework.html

I actually think that would mostly confuse a lot of new undergrads. Fundamentals first, variety later (but it's definitely important!)

I agree. The intro class should use whatever IDE & config will most enable them to teach the fundamentals.

Understanding the details of packages and javac and other things should be left for a later class which can put them in the context of other languages.

Oh I had a very interesting class in eng. school about programming languages paradigms. About subtle differences between different implementations of the same concept. Ada, C++, Java, C# (could've gone to functional languages but the lesson was painful enough with these 4). Type-erasure, explicit/implicit/partial template instantiation, visibility rules. And then design patterns, in all those languages. How a singleton makes no sense in a language that's not 'full' object and has 'packages' (not the java ones), how GC/RAII/controlled-types change the patterns. It was both a course on 'using language concepts correctly, picking them carefully for a specific need and not 'to avoid writing 3 more lines of code' and also a lesson in 'how can you paint yourself in a corner and prevent yourself from handling the simplest of requirements change'...

Very interesting to see how our mind is shaped by the tools we use.

My small liberal arts school has this as well. It's a great idea but, at least for me, it was hamstrung by the professors being too reliant on their IDEs.