From: Thomas Adam <thomas@...>
Date: 2005-05-27T01:51:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Intellisense and the psychology of typing

On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 01:35:19AM +0900, andrew.queisser@hp.com wrote:
> 1) Intellisense is really just another crutch that does more harm than
> good? There were a few hardcore defenders of this position but not
> many.

I'm indifferent.  It depends what mood I'm in as to whether it is useful
or not -- and invariably I tend not to use it, if only because, being
the author, I know what formal parameters most methods expect.

> 2) Intellisense is really useful but hard to implement well in
> IDEs for dynamic languages? Can anyone comment on the status of
> Intellisense-like tools for dynamic-language IDEs?

It isn't easy -- just look at what CEDET[1] do, and you'll soon see the
headache involved in using it with EMACS.  There's strong talk of
intellisense being introduced into Vim7, and it does already exist in a
limitied capacity with "cream"[2], but only for a particular filetype,
that I can determine.  

Of course, in the case of ruby, where ambiguity tends not to matter, how
would you distinguish between:

puts "hello there, how are you", "I'm fine"

and:

puts ("hello there, how are you", "I'm fine")

... it is not as easy as you'd think.

> 3) Users of dynamic languages are always developing/debugging running
> programs where the current type of a variable is known and hence
> Intellisense is possible again? My own limited experience with dynamic
> languages (Ruby) is limited to edit-run cycles.

Depends on the programmer.

-- Thomas Adam

 [1] http://cedet.sourceforge.net/
 [2] http://cream.sf.net
--  
"One of us is a cigar stand, and one of us is a lovely blue incandescent
guillotine" -- Stephen Malkmus, "Type Slowly" from "Brighten The Corners"