Re: History of code completion

Lex Spoon wrote:


[history of code completion]


> In either style, note that you *have* to have a language-specific
> editor or editor mode for this kind of tool to work. For it to work
> well, you furthermore need the editor to be integrated with the
> compiler (or at least, the editor needs to know about the compiled
> codebase.) For some reason, there is a lot of resistance to such
> integrated development environments, partially because they tend to
> not cooperate well with other languages.


I think that resistance is something from the C crowd. E.g. Pascal
(Delphi, Turbo Pascal) has been doing this for quite a long while now.


> In my more cynical moments, I sometimes wonder if software-development
> tools are driven by a desire to make programming remain "fun". What a
> crazy bunch we are!
>
> -Lex
> [I've used both kinds of editors. The first kind is incredibly
> annoying, because there are lots of common and simple text changes
> that are large changes in the parse tree, e.g, move a close brace
> down a few lines past some other statements. The second kind is still
> around. Teitelbaum et al started a company and turned their stuff
> into products. See http://www.grammatech.com/ -John]


I somehow have the feeling that this is the same battle as an entirely
free form texteditor vs something with modes like VI.

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