| Regarding IDEs: I completely agree with you. And I say this as someone who's used Emacs and REPL for 10 years. I find that I am generally faster in development (at least with new libraries) in Java, than I used to be in Ruby and Python. This is all thanks to the "discovery" ability of IDEs. (I admittedly never tried a Python or Ruby IDE.) And I have the same feeling regarding refactoring. It is not merely limited to renaming a method. I find myself very often making major structural changes to my code. Moving packages around, introducing interfaces, changing type signatures. In this regard working with an IDE makes me feel like a "software architect", I get a big-picture of the project in a much faster and better way than I used to with purely a text editor. I also feel I waste no time on boiler-plate code (which admittedly Java has a lot of). In Netbeans (I am sure it's the same in Eclipse and IDEA) the code generation abilities are terrific. For instance, I can just write "class C implements Interface", press Alt+Enter+Enter and see all interface methods written out and ready for me to fill in the implementation. Regarding the REPL: I've found that with strict typing, I just end up knocking out the code that _I think_ should work, and then I test if it works. I can sometimes type for 200-300 lines without running the code, then test it and see that it actually works. Of course, sometimes it fails too: luckily Java debugging is easy and incredibly capable. However, if you really want a Java REPL, you can have something a little bit similar with BeanShell (you can even embed it into NetBeans). |