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Comment by andretti1977 | Hacker News Reader

andretti1977

Well, definitely this is a great project but at the moment, for what i was able to see in the demo video, the main features are very similar to code completion and API exploring as i can currently perform with my ide (i develop mainly java based app so IntellijIdea or Eclipse give me quite the same help).

Don't want to be rude but it doesn't seem like this tool may currently enhance my productivity.

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The main difference versus IDEs is that everything we show is informed by all the public code we've collected from the web. So e.g. there are a ton of arguments to matplotlib.plot and IDEs can show you them all ranked alphabetically, whereas we can show you common patterns of how people actually use matplotlib.plot in practice, which is often far more useful. (We'll show you the docs, too.)

Another example is if you type "load('abc.json')" without having imported json: there are hundreds of python packages that define a function called "load", but "json" and "simplejson" are by _far_ the most widely used, so we can suggest that you "from json import load". That's something you can't do unless you have a good model of a lot of real-world code.

Any comments on how your product and plans compare to https://sourcegraph.com/?

They seem to have a similar offering with an on-premise version, though lacking the smooth editor integration.

Definitely agree with you. Clearly, this is a tool that has the potential to make Python programming easier by adding functionality similar to what you can inherently get out of the box with a statically typed language + a good IDE. On the other hand, it also underscores Python's deficiencies as a language. I used to love Python, and still do, but I would never use it for a large project of any substantial complexity since I've seen how tremendously useful static typing is both for writing code and, arguably more importantly, reading and analyzing existing code. A couple of huge advantages are very robust auto-completion, the ability to quickly and immediately jump to the source code of a given type, and finding references to a given type across the codebase without ambiguity. Kite gets you part of the way, but the nature of Python means it'll never beat Java in these aspects.

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