From: Lothar Scholz Date: 2005-03-30T14:30:54+09:00 Subject: Re: Open letter to anyone developing a Ruby IDE Hello Eric, EH> Where exactly does type inference come in for an auto-completion EH> feature for an IDE? EH> Something so heavyweight as type inferencing is unnecessary for doing EH> 90% of the work of figuring out what the likely completions for a EH> particular chunk of code you're writing. EH> While this won't get an accurate completion every time, you really EH> don't care. You'll find that 90% of the time the word you want is less EH> than 3 presses of tab away. Unfortunately this is not what people expect, at least when they come from the Java world. Code Completition is a learning tool not primarily to save some keystrokes. You slowly learn the available messages for a class while writing your code. Therefore a much better way then showing a huge list with hundrets of strings list should be available. And methods have the heuristic that they share a common prefix and differ only the last characters. This makes your (emacs/vi) completition even more useless. Thats why for example Wing IDE for python is so successful. They even encourage their users to use type asserts, which is IMHO a good thing. As a result they can show some precise information. -- Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com Lothar Scholz http://www.ruby-ide.com CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's