My first encounter with programming for engineers was in college with already antiquated machines running Unix (in 2001-2002), and with a professor requiring us to use some basic text editor and debugging by printf. It put me off from programming for several years before I came back to it with higher level languages (VBA then .net) and rich IDE (the excellent Visual Studio).

The IDE (and debugging experience) is as important if not more than the language in my opinion.