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Comment by willwhitney | Hacker News Reader

I like to break my code up into little functions that are easy to test, so that flow works well for me.

Even more powerful, though, is autocomplete from the running environment. It means that (just like in the Chrome Dev Tools) when you start typing something, the autocomplete suggestions include all of the valid names that are defined. It really helps in navigating complex APIs like Torch: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e6hriw5quwct65a/Screenshot%202015-...

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Pretty awesome, this is something I had been thinking about since using light table and julia - live programming, visualization and bringing auto complete and live syntax checking to julia. Very cool! I think these methods if they work on a larger scale will ultimately be a better way to program.

How powerful is autocomplete, when statically typed languages also provide it?

The development experience for statically typed languages is often _amazing_ compared to that of dynamically typed ones; we sometimes choose dynamically typed ones anyway because of the flexibility and speed of development they give. I'd be very happy with an environment that provided dynamically typed languages the same analysis, checking, completion, etc that statically typed languages take for granted.

I'm working a type system called type-less that is oriented in this direction; check out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II1PgYTPW_U

I need to do another video soon, the work has progressed a bit further since then.

> I'd be very happy with an environment that provided dynamically typed languages the same analysis, checking, completion

Thinks like tern.js[0] or my own Aulx[1] provide that with varying success. Visual Studio's JS autocompletion is also stellar. The techniques used could be applied (with tweaks) to most dynamic languages.

[0]: http://ternjs.net/doc/demo.html

[1]: http://espadrine.github.io/aulx/

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