[seanmcdirmid]

This. Autocomplete is like GPS for writing code in the presence of large libraries and complex APIs. It has nothing to do (at least now) with saving on keystrokes, and intellisense marketing docs post 1997 exclude this as a selling point.

[dman]

The flip side is that by lowering the cognitive burden it breaks the feedback loop nudging programmers to create simple/elegant apis. I suspect we would be seeing fewer complex api's if there was less of a reliance on IDE's.

[seanmcdirmid]

I'm not sure. You can look at dynamic language libraries and see similar increases in complexity (batteries included began with python), while they cannot benefit from code completion very much given a lack of static type info. The increase in library complexity is probably more related to demands on what we need to write where tooling is just a supporter.

[dman]

Java and Python are good languages to compare here since Java appears to have the most money thrown at IDE's in the recent past. Python has a few IDE's but theyre nowhere as magical as Java based IDE's. The average python api that I have come across is usually much more concise than its Java equivalent and there is a strong culture of dwim in the Python community. How much of this is a result of the tooling support for either language and how much is a cultural artifact of the respective community is an open question.

[mongol]

That is a great analogy.