| > Nothing about the language or its tooling prevents you from building such an IDE or a plugin to one of the existing IDEs. And there is absolutely nothing in Java that makes IntelliJ so awesome. These things are totally orthogonal. No, they're not. There are a few necessary conditions for this kind of symbiosis to work well: - The language has to be statically typed. Without type information, the IDE is completely blind and can barely help you at all without human supervision. - The IDE has to be written on top of the same runtime as the language it's editing. This is what makes Eclipse/IDEA and Visual Studio so spectacular: they understand the bytecode they are working with. These are necessary conditions but they're not sufficient. You can still write crappy IDE's if these conditions are met, but thankfully, IDEA/Eclipse/Visual Studio are technical wonders that multiply the productivity of their users. For example, in Go, the simple action of selecting the the surrounding expression simply doesn't exist anywhere. It's the most basic automatic action that's trivial to do with the proper language and IDE, and yet nonexistent in Go. Along with tens of others. That's the price to pay when a language is designed without any consideration for its tooling nor basic things we learned about language design these past twenty years. |
Go is statically typed.
> the simple action of selecting the the surrounding expression simply doesn't exist anywhere
How so? It's trivial with the `go/ast` package.