NetBeans 64-bit vs 32-bit

I am taking a frontend development class for which I have been required by the teacher to download NetBeans 8 with HTML5 and PHP. It's a simple HTML/CSS class where we will create several small projects and deploy them to a hosting service.

The teacher has stated that it is required to have a 64-bit OS. I have a 32-bit machine and can't see why that matters. Would having the 32-bit version of NetBeans matter? The teacher couldn't give me a single reason why it would matter when I asked.