From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2005-05-27T02:26:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Intellisense and the psychology of typing

Hello andrew,

aqhc> 1) Intellisense is really just another crutch that does more harm than
aqhc> good? There were a few hardcore defenders of this position but not
aqhc> many.

When doing wrong (showing wrong types, obmitting methods, adding wrong
methods) it might harm more then being good.

Intellisense has 2 completely different use cases:

a) Reducing typing overhead.
   This is easy to implement

b) Learning the API.
   This is the real hard one.

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

for use case (a) it is implemented in a few IDE's/Editors
for (b) nobody came up to a useable implementation upto now. I don't
think that the JEdit latest plugin is so useful for people who want to
do (a) or (b).

Intellisense is usefull without doubt. But it is to 90% a feature of
static typed languages.

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

No you must check your understanding of program runtime and editing time.


-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's