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by stcredzero 2247 days ago
Personally I dislike var/auto in languages because I like having types explicitly written. But in case of languages like Java or Kotlin you can move the cursor over the variable name and you will see the type, also you can right-click and select "replace with explicit type" and it will work. In D, IDEs struggle with templates and can rarely index templated code (no wonder, because most of the code doesn't exist until build time).

It's 2020. Why couldn't things work like this, where one can open a window for a concrete type using templates, and it shows the code?
2 comments
kevin_thibedeau 2247 days ago
A well designed language should be usable from a text editor. Even in 2020.
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harikb 2247 days ago
I agree. I will paraphrase this as - a well designed language should be usable, at minimum, from a pure text editor, and should not put unreasonable burden on an IDE.
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shrimpx 2247 days ago
The cynic in me wants to say that such a language doesn’t lend itself to static analysis. As soon as you can do great things with static analysis you can build those features into an IDE, therefore causing the “pure text editor” to feel crippled giving rise to the idea that this language is “unusable from a pure text editor”.
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qqssccfftt 2247 days ago
A good dev uses an IDE. In 2020.
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snazz 2247 days ago
This is a really tired argument that we don't need to get into right now. Different things appeal to different people.
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entropicdrifter 2247 days ago
Two things can be true. You shouldn't need an IDE to grok the code.
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petee 2247 days ago
A good dev shouldn't require crutches
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Dylan16807 2247 days ago
Interactivity is not a crutch.
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petee 2247 days ago
Interactivity is a base attribute of an ide, and not the first reason people use it; the context here is that using an ide doesn't define a good programmer. So being able to clicky click is what makes good programmers to you?
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Dylan16807 2246 days ago
They said that good devs use IDEs, not that IDE use makes you a good dev. Those are very different statements.
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skocznymroczny 2247 days ago
Templates don't exist until compile time, until you build the code, the IDE plugin doesn't have the full data on what types exactly are there. Java/C# generics are more limited in functionality, but it's a tradeoff in exchange for better ahead of time knowledge of types.
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pjmlp 2244 days ago
Visual Studio can do that, you just provide an example type and the IDE shows what the result would be.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/template-intellisense...

Now try that on vim.

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