13 ms·

Show HN: CodeMatch: IDE autocomplete on overdrive

102 points by moondistance 15y ago

xlife 15y ago
The installation link should be selectable somewhere, i only find it in the image. http://languageinterfaces.com/eclipsePlugin http://languageinterfaces.com/eclipsePlugin
- dougwightman 15y ago
  Thanks, now fixed :)
  - windsurfer 15y ago
    user: dougwightman created: 591 days ago And this is your first comment, along with an awesome submission! Welcome to HN ;)
noonat 15y ago
Great idea! It's a shame it's only available for Eclipse. I would definitely make use of this if it were available as an operating system level plugin for OS X, a la TextExpander.
- moondistance 15y ago
  Thanks! Xcode and MSVS plugins are in progress. Should be available this fall. This is just the first release :)
  - snorkel 15y ago
    ... and TextMate s'il vous plaît
  - ryanmolden 15y ago
    Feel free to contact me if you need any help / info on VS integration, mail in profile. I don't work on the editor team, which is probably where the bulk of your work will be, but I know some people there so I can point in the general direction.
    - dougwightman 15y ago
      Thank you! We could definitely use help.
  - jm4 15y ago
    Is IntelliJ on the road map?
    - ldar15 15y ago
      IntelliJ already has shared template libraries, along with in-place choice / definition of the variables. What it doesnt have is the search. I'm betting that gets added shortly.
  - fuzzythinker 15y ago
    sublimeText?
- conradev 15y ago
  Yeah, I was excited until I saw it was for Eclipse.
samwhoo 15y ago
Wow. That's absolutely mental! ^_^ I don't think I would use it myself, I'm a Vim guy, but I can see it being a very useful tool. Good work!
- LiveTheDream 15y ago
  I'm a vim user myself, but there's no reason this couldn't be made into a vim plugin.
xtacy 15y ago
Very interesting idea. I usually maintain a list of snippets that do very common processing and paste it myself. I see CodeMatch as a nice interface to access template-ized snippets, such as those that come with TextMate. Is it more than that?
- moondistance 15y ago
  We think parameterized shortcuts will be the primary use case, but there are several other cases that we're also excited about. Code snippets can easily be shared (they are stored online) and code snippets are searchable (beyond memorized shortcuts, you can find snippets previously unknown to you).
_debug_ 15y ago
You just increased average developer productivity tens of times. I can already see the haters hate this new easy way to "code by copy paste", but for people who just want to use code to get things done, i.e., all 100% of coders, including the haters, this is a revolutionary boon.
- LiveTheDream 15y ago
  This is a very cool project, and I agree that it will increase average developers' productivity. I do fear, however, for maintainability of those developers' codebases. Programming by copy/paste is bad because making a change to functionality in the future requires making the change in all the places you copy/pasted to. This tool might actually not suffer too badly from that downside, because the snippets are small enough that you wouldn't break them out into a separate function anyway.
kellysutton 15y ago
Well done on the tool. The Java Overlords should take note: this is what the language should look like. It shouldn't take special software to be expressive.
- projectileboy 15y ago
  Exactly my reaction. While I'm very impressed by the tool, my main impression was that the language should have constructs allowing one to as expressive as possible, at the appropriate level of abstraction.
- ibejoeb 15y ago
  I'd use this less to deal with a language's lack of expressiveness and more to deal with abstruse APIs. It would be very useful for httplib2 or SQLAlchemy, even though both are written in a pretty expressive language. I'd especially be interested in creating snippets for my own proprietary APIs, which are typically move more quickly and are generally less documented that big, established public APIs.
  - dougwightman 15y ago
    I think this is a great use case. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help :)
rkalla 15y ago
Absolutely love: 1. IDE plugin (Eclipse, Xcode + MSVS incoming) 2. Community driven snippets 3. Integrated into autocomplete This approach is the trifecta of productivity for software developers. I remember years ago finding some "overly smart" autocomplete hints from IntelliJ that surprised me, for example typing paths to files and having it automatically guess at the path given the execution context and that blew me away. At some point all of those "try and be extra smart" rules fell out of favor and seemed to disappear and just get replaced by more robust/concrete type-inference inside the IDE. I understand why, trying to be TOO smart and getting it wrong is absolutely maddening and helps no one, but it was still nice to see. These clippets remind me of a middle ground, where the tool is trying to be very smart, but also requiring you to fill in the part it can't concretely guess at (e.g. path variables in the demo video). The other big win here is that since this is essentially search plus paramaterized clippets, there is no reason this cannot work for Python, Ruby, Go, JavaScript and anything else you would want. The community aspects of building up the repo is just brilliant. Best of luck to this team, this looks like a hell of a nice job!
- Groxx 15y ago
  4. version-controlled snippets so you can know if there are improvements / errors add that, and we're golden. But stale copy/paste code is flat-out dangerous, and that's all this really is from a code standpoint, with a bit of magic and discovery. Not that I'm downplaying the tool - I think it looks really good. Just that using community-generated code is dangerous unless you either carefully curate it, or understand everything it does.
  - encoderer 15y ago
    Copy/Paste as horrible I think is oversold. I would never paste in a snippet of code from a bad programmer because the code would look ugly and wrong and it would be obvious. So the risk is bad programmers copy/pasting from other bad programmers. Sounds like an argument against bad programmers, not copy/paste. Not everything should be abstracted into a library. I think the example in their screencast is a good one. Yes, if the snippet has a bug, you're copying that bug everywhere. But if it doesn't, it saves you from writing a potentially buggy implementation. I believed for many years as a programmer the dogma against copy/paste. Now i use it, as I use any other tool, in a way that I find appropriate.
andreyf 15y ago
Will you have an API? I'd love to see integration with github's editor :)
- dougwightman 15y ago
  Yes, there is an API. I'll document it online this weekend :)
spaghetti 15y ago
Awesome! I think CodeMatch could be the keystone for a partially voice-controlled IDE. CodeMatch maps relatively simple strings (like "read files") to nice code snippets. The next step is to map simple voice commands (like "read files") to their string representation in CodeMatch. I'm excited :-)
- mike_h 15y ago
  Killer leverage there. Also: mobile (touchscreen UI) development.
  - dougwightman 15y ago
    Do you think there would be immediate interest? I have considered building a mobile development tool, but didn't think mobile dev. was popular. However, it might be of interest to amateur programmers who lack access to laptops/desktops. Would be easy to build :)
    - mike_h 15y ago
      Hard to say: it hasn't had much of an opportunity to become popular, because it hasn't been a real option so far ;) That said, my sense is similar to what yours sounds like -- the audience will remain small, just because it'll never be as fast, even after a tool like yours cuts down the entry time. I'll ask around and try to generate some use cases or niches where mobile could take off, and get ahold of you if I do. I remember Paul G. talking about it a year or two ago, maybe if you can get ahold of him he could share his thoughts. Meanwhile -- nice work.
awegawef 15y ago
I like this a lot, but I'm frustrated by not being able to browse the snippets online. Ideally this would have an online backend like StackOverflow where users could browse the "keywords => code snippet" relationship, make comments, vote, and make revisions. With an open API, people would create the IDE plugins for you. I know I'd happily contribute to a vim plugin.
- dougwightman 15y ago
  Thanks, we will open the API. If you share your contact info I'll let you know when it's available. Snippets will also soon be browsable online (early September) :)
abecedarius 15y ago
Is how this works, and its limitations, explained in the audio track? Because some of us are deaf.
- wr1472 15y ago
  The video has no audio.
  - abecedarius 15y ago
    Thanks. I asked because there are responses about things not explicit in the video (like "community driven snippets").
kragen 15y ago
I didn't listen to the audio on this video, so maybe I'm missing something. Don't you think it would be better to write the code like this? source = windows_desktop_folder() for file in source.list_files_in_folder(): file.move_to_folder(source.subfolder("Photos")) Or in my pidgin Java: Path source = windowsDesktopFolder(); for (Path file : source.listFiles()) { file.moveToFolder(source.subfolder("Photos")); } It might take a little bit longer to write the code that way, but it seems to me that it would be a lot easier to read the code afterward when you have to debug it; and you could use the same search engine to search methods that you use to search snippets. (There's also the issue that, however good your snippet library is, it will contain bugs, and changes in the outside world will require corresponding changes in the library. One example is that my code here could conceivably run on MacOS or Linux, while the snippeted code hardcodes backslashes and therefore cannot.)
- LiveTheDream 15y ago
  There actually is no audio, so you didn't miss anything.
- stevebanders 15y ago
  Makes sense to me. CodeMatch also supports method and class insertion (http://languageinterfaces.com/help http://languageinterfaces.com/help). If you create and share a snippet, I bet it would get upvoted (within CodeMatch). Edit: there's a special markup to add a method/class - click on the "Insert Formula" button when in the snippet submission form for instructions.
- MajorMcDoom 15y ago
  Sure, the example in the video isn't perfect. If you think you have a better way of doing things, you can always submit it as another snippet, and that's the whole point. The video isn't trying to promote the specific code snippets - it's trying to promote one way to find and integrate them.
  - kragen 15y ago
    I do think I have a better way of doing things: instead of writing snippets that people then copy and paste, write functions, methods, and modules that people can then simply call. This results in software containing ten times less code, which makes it dramatically easier to fix, maintain, and extend, than a system built by copying and pasting code snippets. Now, I am not going to claim that this is a new idea. Ada Byron, after all, invented the subroutine. What I am going to claim is that programming by pasting snippets together and editing them, which is not a new idea either, is a stupid idea. The idea is probably at least as old as the subroutine. We have something like 60 years of experience with programming by copy-and-paste. That's plenty of time to figure out that it's stupid. It's a bad idea. It makes your programs hard to understand and hard to change. We'll probably never stop doing it, because sometimes it's unavoidable. But having a search engine that makes it even easier to paste code snippets does not make pasting code snippets a better idea. It makes it a worse idea, because it means that you can screw yourself more quickly and thoroughly. I want to see a case that you think is better written using pasted-together snippets of code instead of by calling subroutines. The burden of proof is not on me; I'm just explaining the conventional wisdom. It's on you if you want to show that the conventional wisdom is wrong. I do think that a search engine for APIs would be useful, and that a lot of APIs suck.
zszugyi 15y ago
This is a great idea, but it would be nice to have a page on the website with a clear license of the snippets.
jrockway 15y ago
This is one of Java's biggest problems: people write tools instead of libraries. Getting the path to the Desktop should be achieved in some way other than hardcoding the word "Desktop" and the path separator in your application code; it should be a method on some generic "desktop environment configuration" object that's passed into the class that needs it. There are a number of big problems with autogenerated code. One is that if you change your "how to get the path to the Desktop" algorithm, you have to manually change it in every place. This is hard to get right, so now your program is buggy and you have no way of knowing that you ever fixed it. Another problem is that the hard-coded solution is intrinsically inflexible; if the programmer had delegated to some other object, configuration could be passed into the class. It's not the "move all files out of this directory" class' job to know the details of where Windows, GNOME, KDE, and OS X keep the desktop! One other nitpick is the flaky snippet that makes the for loop. Typing "for (File file : files) {" takes almost no time. But the snippet names the loop variable wrong ("elem"?), and correcting this takes more time than manually typing it correctly the first time. If you're going to be smart, be smart; look up the un-pluarlization in a dictionary and choose that. But don't choose a super-generic variable name, because now you've made the code of everyone that uses this tool less readable. All in all, people seem to love shit like this, but it encourages horrible programming practices. Making it easy to write long, linear pieces of code is not a good thing. I think the opposite is what we really need: make it harder to type so that you spend more time thinking and creating a design that requires less code!
- stevebanders 15y ago
  If you don't know how to access the "desktop environment configuration" object, how do you find it? Snippet search integrated into the IDE is very useful. Yes, the snippets in the video aren't perfect. That isn't a big deal - those snippets will be modified/replaced.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    My point is that you shouldn't need snippets; where you would use a snippet, write a library instead. Adding code to your application is the worst possible thing you can do when programming. Don't use tools that make this easy.
edtechdev 15y ago
funny how the titles of the snippets look just like applescript/hypertalk
silverlake 15y ago
I saw a demo for something like this at a PLDI conference a long time ago. I think it was someone at IBM Research. I'm not sure if this is it, but the Quake IDE extension looks similar: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/other-pubs/sloppy-programming.pdf http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/other-pubs/sloppy-programmin...
shabble 15y ago
There's probably already a dozen different ways to do this with Emacs, with context sensitivity depending on how hard you try, what language you use, and if you're prepared to suffer CEDET. See http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Yasnippet http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Yasnippet for one option, http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AutoComplete#toc2 http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AutoComplete#toc2 for another, and various bolt-ons to Anything: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Anything http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Anything
alextingle 15y ago
Turning off the autocomplete/intellisense/whatever is always the first thing I do when forced to use an IDE (as opposed to a text editor). I find the feature distracting and unhelpful. Curious that I'm so opposed to autocomplete in text editors when I'm so attached to globbing in my shell. What's the difference? Well the first thing is that the shell doesn't use pop-ups that hide my code. This is my #1 problem with "over helpful" editors - popups appear, unasked for, right on top of the code I'm looking at. Secondly, the shell only helps me out when I ask it to. I have to press <TAB> to trigger the globbing. If the shell can't guess what I want, then I just get nothing - I have to press <TAB> a second time to ask it to give me a list to choose from. I'm not sure what the equivalent would be with a programmer's editor. The <TAB> key is pretty important for indentation, but a Ctrl+KEY combo might be too clumsy. Where could the list of choices go where it would be both near to the cursor and not obscure nearby code?
rshm 15y ago
cheers !! very promising.

102 points by moondistance 15y ago

xlife 15y ago

The installation link should be selectable somewhere, i only find it in the image. http://languageinterfaces.com/eclipsePlugin http://languageinterfaces.com/eclipsePlugin

dougwightman 15y ago
Thanks, now fixed :)
- windsurfer 15y ago
  user: dougwightman created: 591 days ago And this is your first comment, along with an awesome submission! Welcome to HN ;)

noonat 15y ago

Great idea! It's a shame it's only available for Eclipse. I would definitely make use of this if it were available as an operating system level plugin for OS X, a la TextExpander.

moondistance 15y ago
Thanks! Xcode and MSVS plugins are in progress. Should be available this fall. This is just the first release :)
- snorkel 15y ago
  ... and TextMate s'il vous plaît
- ryanmolden 15y ago
  Feel free to contact me if you need any help / info on VS integration, mail in profile. I don't work on the editor team, which is probably where the bulk of your work will be, but I know some people there so I can point in the general direction.
  - dougwightman 15y ago
    Thank you! We could definitely use help.
- jm4 15y ago
  Is IntelliJ on the road map?
  - ldar15 15y ago
    IntelliJ already has shared template libraries, along with in-place choice / definition of the variables. What it doesnt have is the search. I'm betting that gets added shortly.
- fuzzythinker 15y ago
  sublimeText?
conradev 15y ago
Yeah, I was excited until I saw it was for Eclipse.

samwhoo 15y ago

Wow. That's absolutely mental! ^_^ I don't think I would use it myself, I'm a Vim guy, but I can see it being a very useful tool. Good work!

LiveTheDream 15y ago
I'm a vim user myself, but there's no reason this couldn't be made into a vim plugin.

xtacy 15y ago

Very interesting idea. I usually maintain a list of snippets that do very common processing and paste it myself. I see CodeMatch as a nice interface to access template-ized snippets, such as those that come with TextMate. Is it more than that?

moondistance 15y ago
We think parameterized shortcuts will be the primary use case, but there are several other cases that we're also excited about. Code snippets can easily be shared (they are stored online) and code snippets are searchable (beyond memorized shortcuts, you can find snippets previously unknown to you).

_debug_ 15y ago

You just increased average developer productivity tens of times. I can already see the haters hate this new easy way to "code by copy paste", but for people who just want to use code to get things done, i.e., all 100% of coders, including the haters, this is a revolutionary boon.

LiveTheDream 15y ago
This is a very cool project, and I agree that it will increase average developers' productivity. I do fear, however, for maintainability of those developers' codebases. Programming by copy/paste is bad because making a change to functionality in the future requires making the change in all the places you copy/pasted to. This tool might actually not suffer too badly from that downside, because the snippets are small enough that you wouldn't break them out into a separate function anyway.

kellysutton 15y ago

Well done on the tool. The Java Overlords should take note: this is what the language should look like. It shouldn't take special software to be expressive.

projectileboy 15y ago
Exactly my reaction. While I'm very impressed by the tool, my main impression was that the language should have constructs allowing one to as expressive as possible, at the appropriate level of abstraction.
ibejoeb 15y ago
I'd use this less to deal with a language's lack of expressiveness and more to deal with abstruse APIs. It would be very useful for httplib2 or SQLAlchemy, even though both are written in a pretty expressive language. I'd especially be interested in creating snippets for my own proprietary APIs, which are typically move more quickly and are generally less documented that big, established public APIs.
- dougwightman 15y ago
  I think this is a great use case. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help :)

rkalla 15y ago

Absolutely love: 1. IDE plugin (Eclipse, Xcode + MSVS incoming) 2. Community driven snippets 3. Integrated into autocomplete This approach is the trifecta of productivity for software developers. I remember years ago finding some "overly smart" autocomplete hints from IntelliJ that surprised me, for example typing paths to files and having it automatically guess at the path given the execution context and that blew me away. At some point all of those "try and be extra smart" rules fell out of favor and seemed to disappear and just get replaced by more robust/concrete type-inference inside the IDE. I understand why, trying to be TOO smart and getting it wrong is absolutely maddening and helps no one, but it was still nice to see. These clippets remind me of a middle ground, where the tool is trying to be very smart, but also requiring you to fill in the part it can't concretely guess at (e.g. path variables in the demo video). The other big win here is that since this is essentially search plus paramaterized clippets, there is no reason this cannot work for Python, Ruby, Go, JavaScript and anything else you would want. The community aspects of building up the repo is just brilliant. Best of luck to this team, this looks like a hell of a nice job!

Groxx 15y ago
4. version-controlled snippets so you can know if there are improvements / errors add that, and we're golden. But stale copy/paste code is flat-out dangerous, and that's all this really is from a code standpoint, with a bit of magic and discovery. Not that I'm downplaying the tool - I think it looks really good. Just that using community-generated code is dangerous unless you either carefully curate it, or understand everything it does.
- encoderer 15y ago
  Copy/Paste as horrible I think is oversold. I would never paste in a snippet of code from a bad programmer because the code would look ugly and wrong and it would be obvious. So the risk is bad programmers copy/pasting from other bad programmers. Sounds like an argument against bad programmers, not copy/paste. Not everything should be abstracted into a library. I think the example in their screencast is a good one. Yes, if the snippet has a bug, you're copying that bug everywhere. But if it doesn't, it saves you from writing a potentially buggy implementation. I believed for many years as a programmer the dogma against copy/paste. Now i use it, as I use any other tool, in a way that I find appropriate.

andreyf 15y ago

Will you have an API? I'd love to see integration with github's editor :)

dougwightman 15y ago
Yes, there is an API. I'll document it online this weekend :)

spaghetti 15y ago

Awesome! I think CodeMatch could be the keystone for a partially voice-controlled IDE. CodeMatch maps relatively simple strings (like "read files") to nice code snippets. The next step is to map simple voice commands (like "read files") to their string representation in CodeMatch. I'm excited :-)

mike_h 15y ago
Killer leverage there. Also: mobile (touchscreen UI) development.
- dougwightman 15y ago
  Do you think there would be immediate interest? I have considered building a mobile development tool, but didn't think mobile dev. was popular. However, it might be of interest to amateur programmers who lack access to laptops/desktops. Would be easy to build :)
  - mike_h 15y ago
    Hard to say: it hasn't had much of an opportunity to become popular, because it hasn't been a real option so far ;) That said, my sense is similar to what yours sounds like -- the audience will remain small, just because it'll never be as fast, even after a tool like yours cuts down the entry time. I'll ask around and try to generate some use cases or niches where mobile could take off, and get ahold of you if I do. I remember Paul G. talking about it a year or two ago, maybe if you can get ahold of him he could share his thoughts. Meanwhile -- nice work.

awegawef 15y ago

I like this a lot, but I'm frustrated by not being able to browse the snippets online. Ideally this would have an online backend like StackOverflow where users could browse the "keywords => code snippet" relationship, make comments, vote, and make revisions. With an open API, people would create the IDE plugins for you. I know I'd happily contribute to a vim plugin.

dougwightman 15y ago
Thanks, we will open the API. If you share your contact info I'll let you know when it's available. Snippets will also soon be browsable online (early September) :)

abecedarius 15y ago

Is how this works, and its limitations, explained in the audio track? Because some of us are deaf.

wr1472 15y ago
The video has no audio.
- abecedarius 15y ago
  Thanks. I asked because there are responses about things not explicit in the video (like "community driven snippets").

kragen 15y ago

I didn't listen to the audio on this video, so maybe I'm missing something. Don't you think it would be better to write the code like this? source = windows_desktop_folder() for file in source.list_files_in_folder(): file.move_to_folder(source.subfolder("Photos")) Or in my pidgin Java: Path source = windowsDesktopFolder(); for (Path file : source.listFiles()) { file.moveToFolder(source.subfolder("Photos")); } It might take a little bit longer to write the code that way, but it seems to me that it would be a lot easier to read the code afterward when you have to debug it; and you could use the same search engine to search methods that you use to search snippets. (There's also the issue that, however good your snippet library is, it will contain bugs, and changes in the outside world will require corresponding changes in the library. One example is that my code here could conceivably run on MacOS or Linux, while the snippeted code hardcodes backslashes and therefore cannot.)

LiveTheDream 15y ago
There actually is no audio, so you didn't miss anything.
stevebanders 15y ago
Makes sense to me. CodeMatch also supports method and class insertion (http://languageinterfaces.com/help http://languageinterfaces.com/help). If you create and share a snippet, I bet it would get upvoted (within CodeMatch). Edit: there's a special markup to add a method/class - click on the "Insert Formula" button when in the snippet submission form for instructions.
MajorMcDoom 15y ago
Sure, the example in the video isn't perfect. If you think you have a better way of doing things, you can always submit it as another snippet, and that's the whole point. The video isn't trying to promote the specific code snippets - it's trying to promote one way to find and integrate them.
- kragen 15y ago
  I do think I have a better way of doing things: instead of writing snippets that people then copy and paste, write functions, methods, and modules that people can then simply call. This results in software containing ten times less code, which makes it dramatically easier to fix, maintain, and extend, than a system built by copying and pasting code snippets. Now, I am not going to claim that this is a new idea. Ada Byron, after all, invented the subroutine. What I am going to claim is that programming by pasting snippets together and editing them, which is not a new idea either, is a stupid idea. The idea is probably at least as old as the subroutine. We have something like 60 years of experience with programming by copy-and-paste. That's plenty of time to figure out that it's stupid. It's a bad idea. It makes your programs hard to understand and hard to change. We'll probably never stop doing it, because sometimes it's unavoidable. But having a search engine that makes it even easier to paste code snippets does not make pasting code snippets a better idea. It makes it a worse idea, because it means that you can screw yourself more quickly and thoroughly. I want to see a case that you think is better written using pasted-together snippets of code instead of by calling subroutines. The burden of proof is not on me; I'm just explaining the conventional wisdom. It's on you if you want to show that the conventional wisdom is wrong. I do think that a search engine for APIs would be useful, and that a lot of APIs suck.

zszugyi 15y ago

This is a great idea, but it would be nice to have a page on the website with a clear license of the snippets.

jrockway 15y ago

This is one of Java's biggest problems: people write tools instead of libraries. Getting the path to the Desktop should be achieved in some way other than hardcoding the word "Desktop" and the path separator in your application code; it should be a method on some generic "desktop environment configuration" object that's passed into the class that needs it. There are a number of big problems with autogenerated code. One is that if you change your "how to get the path to the Desktop" algorithm, you have to manually change it in every place. This is hard to get right, so now your program is buggy and you have no way of knowing that you ever fixed it. Another problem is that the hard-coded solution is intrinsically inflexible; if the programmer had delegated to some other object, configuration could be passed into the class. It's not the "move all files out of this directory" class' job to know the details of where Windows, GNOME, KDE, and OS X keep the desktop! One other nitpick is the flaky snippet that makes the for loop. Typing "for (File file : files) {" takes almost no time. But the snippet names the loop variable wrong ("elem"?), and correcting this takes more time than manually typing it correctly the first time. If you're going to be smart, be smart; look up the un-pluarlization in a dictionary and choose that. But don't choose a super-generic variable name, because now you've made the code of everyone that uses this tool less readable. All in all, people seem to love shit like this, but it encourages horrible programming practices. Making it easy to write long, linear pieces of code is not a good thing. I think the opposite is what we really need: make it harder to type so that you spend more time thinking and creating a design that requires less code!

stevebanders 15y ago
If you don't know how to access the "desktop environment configuration" object, how do you find it? Snippet search integrated into the IDE is very useful. Yes, the snippets in the video aren't perfect. That isn't a big deal - those snippets will be modified/replaced.
- jrockway 15y ago
  My point is that you shouldn't need snippets; where you would use a snippet, write a library instead. Adding code to your application is the worst possible thing you can do when programming. Don't use tools that make this easy.

edtechdev 15y ago

funny how the titles of the snippets look just like applescript/hypertalk

silverlake 15y ago

I saw a demo for something like this at a PLDI conference a long time ago. I think it was someone at IBM Research. I'm not sure if this is it, but the Quake IDE extension looks similar: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/other-pubs/sloppy-programming.pdf http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/other-pubs/sloppy-programmin...

shabble 15y ago

There's probably already a dozen different ways to do this with Emacs, with context sensitivity depending on how hard you try, what language you use, and if you're prepared to suffer CEDET. See http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Yasnippet http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Yasnippet for one option, http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AutoComplete#toc2 http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AutoComplete#toc2 for another, and various bolt-ons to Anything: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Anything http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Anything

alextingle 15y ago

Turning off the autocomplete/intellisense/whatever is always the first thing I do when forced to use an IDE (as opposed to a text editor). I find the feature distracting and unhelpful. Curious that I'm so opposed to autocomplete in text editors when I'm so attached to globbing in my shell. What's the difference? Well the first thing is that the shell doesn't use pop-ups that hide my code. This is my #1 problem with "over helpful" editors - popups appear, unasked for, right on top of the code I'm looking at. Secondly, the shell only helps me out when I ask it to. I have to press <TAB> to trigger the globbing. If the shell can't guess what I want, then I just get nothing - I have to press <TAB> a second time to ask it to give me a list to choose from. I'm not sure what the equivalent would be with a programmer's editor. The <TAB> key is pretty important for indentation, but a Ctrl+KEY combo might be too clumsy. Where could the list of choices go where it would be both near to the cursor and not obscure nearby code?

rshm 15y ago

cheers !! very promising.