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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why you think they don't? Most IDE's do typically build a language-specific search index and keep it up to date as you edit. (That's the main difference between an IDE and a text editor, though the line is blurrier these days.)

Having taken Teitelbaum's compiler class as an undergrad, I was happy to ditch the IDE he inflicted on us and go back to text editors. Structured code editing is a tricky UI problem and I didn't find a really good IDE until many years later.

There's no one way to edit code. Sometimes refactoring tools work well, but typing text can be quite efficient too. Getting locked into a tree editor at the expression level is no fun.

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>I'm not sure why you think they don't?

If they are they either aren't offering user/programmer access to that database, they aren't doing semantic/type binds, or aren't advertising those features well.

>I was happy to ditch the IDE he inflicted on us and go back to text editors. Structured code editing is a tricky UI problem

It's reconcilable with normal text editing, just update the structure once its valid. I agree that things like block/visual programming can be absurd.

I'm not sure what you mean by "semantic/type binds", but if you're writing a plugin, IDE's like Eclipse and IDEA do give you access to program syntax via a Java API, and for many languages there is also type-aware indexing. Typically this is exposed to the user as specific queries (such as "go to definition" or "find all usages") and updates ("rename method"). From a UI perspective, more features can be added by writing more plugins and/or improving them.

But this indexing is only on one user's workstation and tends not to scale up well. Updating dependencies or switching to a different branch means rebuilding large parts of the index.

Also, part of the problem is that there is little standardization. Many ecosystems are language, platform, build tool, and/or editor-specific. When you do something new you end up reinventing the wheel.

Especially in statically typed programs you want to "break" your program for refactoring purposes. Usually I look at a function or class and create new functions/classes and then rename the old one and then fix all the errors one by one by using the new code.

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