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I hear you, but I can't agree. Maybe it's my background. For 13 years as a professional developer my primary languages were Perl and Javascript, using Vim and the Unix command-line as my IDE. For the past 1.5 years I've swapped C# for Perl and Visual Studio for my IDE (still have a vi emulator though.) Intellisense is definitely useful, but I find it gets in the way a lot... both literally by overlapping the code around the code I'm typing, and figuratively by trying to insert text while I type which causes me to double-type characters and backspace a lot. It does help with remembering (not learning) APIs, but that's one of my concerns about translating to js: Intellisense won't know which APIs are usable and which ones are not. If you're a C# developer who's dependent on Intellisense, it's going to mislead you here. Regarding refactoring, it's hardly worry free for me. I always have to double check what VS is going to do when I use its refactoring tools, because sometimes it makes a significant mistake. Now, that's often caused by the way I wrote some code and I have to fix it up as part of my refactoring, but I would have discovered that while refactoring manually too, and if I trusted VS I wouldn't have discovered it at all. So VS helps a bit with the typing, but it's not much faster than I'd be without it. A lot of that is probably because I learned to refactor using vim, grep, sed, and other Unix command-line tools, so I have no problem doing large-scale refactoring changes touching thousands of lines over a 100k+ line codebase. Extracting a method is childs play in comparison, and I don't mind the extra few seconds it takes to do it manually exactly the way I want it. There is definitely a need for better javascript editing tools. VS, with the right plugins, wouldn't be bad, but I'm not sure Intellisense can really cut it. When I'm putting some code into an MVC template or js file and I want to refer to a jQuery plugin I know is loaded by my layout template, there is no way for Intellisense to know about that plugin or its API, so it can't help me. In contrast if I load my app in Firefox and use Firebug's console and debugger, I can type in some code and it's able to show me the API in real-time because it's reflecting the live javascript objects as I type. That's the kind of intellisense I want. |
What I'm wondering is, why can't we have the browser then be our IDE, chrome already supports editing, just need to persist it to my code base
By the way, I strongly suggest using something like resharper, VS is great, but I found eclipse much better if you are looking for those tricks and shortcuts.
If you haven't tried it yet, I encourage anyone to get eclipse, put in some java code, and play with ctrl+1 magic shortcut (mark anything in code and let it do the work for you) it allows you to be more expressive and write code in a modular way, for example, I don't have to be a boolean logic master, or even a smart developer to extract negation up a boolean condition, and if I forgot a param / method, it will create it for me with the right signature, and if I see a piece of string I want to replace with a variable, it takes it for me and adds those dreadful " + ... + " in so I don't have to. does it makes you a zombie programmer? probably yes, does it make you smarter? probably not, but does it make you more productive? absolutely yes.
again, VS I think is nowhere near eclipse JDT in that end (without resharper at least)
I think this is why GWT, Dart, Scala, Hibernate / Seam, Spring all invest so much in eclipse,
most developers of this world (me included) are just not good enough hackers to do it the VIM / grep way... sad but true.