If code can be written by auto completion, it's by definition redundant and IMHO shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
Also, it makes APIs incredibly discoverable. Not sure what a `IQueryable` provides?
IQueryable iq = null; iq.
(edit: formatting)
* Cmd+Tab to Chrome
* Cmd+L for location focus
* \IQueryable searches DuckDuckGo for IQueryable and takes me to first result
I get to use the editor I want (hint, not visual studio), and I know a lot more about IQueryable anyway and can continue poking around in the docs to learn more about the 'nearby' bits of the API.
I don't really want my editor to write code for me after only a fraction of the characters. I like writing code. I agree with Inufu, I feel like completion of more than, say, IQu[tab] is starting to show redundancy I'd prefer not to have in the first place.
"That doesn't sound all that good to me. Here's how I do it in multiple steps, in a different window!"
Do you see the problem here?
Those who don't understand UNIX are forever doomed to re-implement it - poorly. Which is the story of every IDE ever.
I spent years hating Java and embracing vim, but as I tried to shape my environment more, I grew increasingly frustrated. Finally, I was forced by necessity to use Eclipse and Maven with Java, and the lightbulb turned on for me.
Any language that takes 30-40% less code to do something for you is taking away some freedom. They're making convention easy but can make escaping it to be hard, or may slow down because of more dynamic-ness, or some other tradeoff. And there are many good tradeoffs to be had when creating programming languages, of course.
The deal with Java is that it is the pedant of languages. Half-answers and hand-waving to how objects interact (i.e. duck-typing) aren't good enough for it. This makes libraries or APIs very, very easy to reason about, because if it doesn't access to that information then that means that the library or API is broken or intentionally hiding those details from you. But on the other hand, it enforces a kind of light, but still present, agreement between classes on their relationships to each other.
The point at which your thoughts on IDE come into this is that because Java has a very rigid structure, it can make sweeping code changes at massive scale. This is something that, with shallower insight into the language, or without insight into the flow of code through a method (i.e. checking for dead code or invalid assignments), and so on, would take a massive number of man-hours to duplicate, or make use of the exact same code the IDEs themselves have written for the purpose (i.e. emacs and vim are capable of delegating certain functions to eclipse). Decoupling it in the UNIX way doesn't really make a whole lot of sense when everything is very interrelated in nature.
As well as generate, but given that some people think that if code can be generated, it should be done at runtime by the language instead, I don't want to argue this too hard in this reply. They're not wrong but they sure aren't right.
The description I was replying to had you hovering over little thingies for tooltips. The whole time you're writing code little popups and widgets are flying all over the place. That is distracting. Give me an environment that edits text please.
I'm with you on the crap flying around on every other keypress though. Feels like I'm programming with an extreme case of ADD.
Try Visual Studio for a month. At first you'll be like "get out of my way stupid intellisense popup" and then you'll be like "holy crap that just saved me 60 seconds... for the 60th time today." And then you go home early and use that free time to have sex with your wife.
Point being, it'll change your life for the better.
Trying it again now would be pretty far out of my way just to reaffirm what I already know, since of course I've long since left Windows entirely.
As you said, since you don't use windows, there's no point in you using it. But let me just say that it certainly sucked at one point, but it is now one of Microsoft's best products, IMO. They've definitely done a LOT of work to improve it.