3 ms·
No one's saying it's easy, but enough IDEs have done it that some of us have come to expect it.
by jamesaguilar 14y ago
No one's saying it's easy, but enough IDEs have done it that some of us have come to expect it.
- snprbob86 14y agoI started programming on VB3 and spent many years doing Visual C++ and C# as well as quite a bit of Java with IntelliJ. I depended deeply on IntelliSense/autocomplete. Years later, I don't remember how I ever got anything done with that stupid distracting drop down box. It's just so easy to arrow up/down through that list and hope to stumble upon the correct method to call. On the rare occasion that I type that member accessor dot and don't know what I want, I much prefer full-sized documentation in a browser that I can cmd+f on.
- pbz 14y agoUsing it as an alternative to documentation is a small part. First of all you get a confirmation that what you have up to that point is somewhat correct. If the dropdown doesn't show then something's wrong - sometimes that's ok and expected. You also get a type confirmation and actual completion as in type one or two characters and have the rest filled out for you.
- snprbob86 14y agoIt's just a different style of working, but I almost never type long symbols. I go to their definition site, yank them into a buffer, and paste them into place. Or, I work with a REPL. So I write the code there and run it before putting it into my code base, so I know it's correct.
- bronson 14y agoOnly for old and static languages.
- jamesaguilar 14y agoActually, Eclipse's Python support is decent. You can infer a lot about what a type is by what methods and properties are accessed. It's not perfect, but it can do a decent job of it in a lot of cases.
- recursive 14y agoHow old is old?