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Comment by incepted | Hacker News Reader

DSL are certainly the future of this kind of tools but not with a dynamically typed language like Groovy. The fact that it's dynamically typed makes it pretty much impossible to get decent support from IDE's. Gradle's support in IDEA has been broken forever, and you know that even if the JetBrains guys can't pull it off, it can't be pulled off.

I think the future belongs to statically typed languages that can offer DSL's as terse as Groovy but with actually types in them, so that the IDE can actually do the job it's being paid for.

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> I think the future belongs to statically typed languages that can offer DSL's as terse as Groovy but with actually types in them, so that the IDE can actually do the job it's being paid for.

Not as easy as it sounds. If the DSL is rich enough, and if the types are handled by the host language, type errors can become just as cryptic and unhelpful as with an untyped DSLs, and it's just as hard for the IDE to do something meaningful with them.

Sure, but at least, auto completion works automatically.

With dynamically typed languages, you get cryptic (and vague) errors and auto completion just can't work.

I use auto-completion in Python every day with PyDev. It's not as advanced as for other languages, but "just can't work" is not really true either.

http://www.pydev.org/manual_adv_complctx.html

That also depends on the namespaces used by the language. E.g. auto-completion in Clojure works a lot better than in JS, because every symbol has a unique resolution, known statically (or as unique as in many typed languages). True, you get less helpful suggestions, but OTOH, the error messages can be much clearer than in the typed case. The former can leave error reporting to the DSL, while the latter is restricted to the cryptic types of the host language's compiler. I'm not saying this can't be resolved with some clever compiler plugins, but if we're comparing options available now, the advantage is not so clear-cut (I do favor types, but only as long as they don't get too complex).

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