ActiveState going the wrong way

[David Huttleston Jr]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2001 at 01:34:05PM -0600, Dave Brueck wrote:
> > | Can gVim do the following?
> > |
> > | a) Have autocompletion / intellisense in the editor.
> >
> > no, this is one feature that would be really cool.  OTOH, it makes for
> > a lazy coder who can't (doesn't, rather) remember the
> > function/variable names.  (This is from experience using JBuilder for
> > a while)
> 
> Hi D-Man,
> 
> Lazer coder? How about "makes for a more productive coder". Just as Python
> is nifty for doing a lot of the developer's grunt work, a good IDE or editor
> can boost your productivity by not forcing you to go look up function
> prototypes and what not.
> 
> Lack of autocompletion tends to _encourage_ laziness and _lower_
> productivity. One example is that because the coder has to type out the full
> variable and function names he ends up naming them something short and less
> descriptive, making the code less clear and harder to maintain. Worse, the
> coder then adds a useless comment to tell the purpose of the function, the
> same information that a decent function name would have conveyed.
> 
> -Dave
> 

  I completely agree.  Code-completion eases the pain of descriptive naming
in general.  Vim and Emacs are both excellent development tools.  They both
use ctags (aka Exuberant CTags http://ctags.sourceforge.net/) to provide
most of what you want from code-completion.  In addition, ctags allows
quick navigation through source code using mouse or keyboard to jump to
the definition of a class or function and back.  CTags supports python, 
java, c, c++, eiffel, and many more languages.
  Emacs is a fantastic IDE and not hard to get used to if you get a couple
key libraries like cua.el which provides MS Win style cut and paste.
  Vim and Vide (http://vide.sourceforge.net/) together provide an similarly
flexible enviroment but with a VI feel.  Vim is sciptable in python, which
kicks booty.  I took me about an hour to write my first python 'macro'. Vim
runs a full python interpreter in its process space so your 'macros' can
do literally anything.
  Current I use Emacs because I find the Object Browser and the JDE package
provide a more complete enviroment for java and jython which we use heavily.
But I miss Vim, and it's excellent python support.  Ah well...

Sincerely,
  Another Dave

> 
> -- 
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

-- 
David Huttleston Jr
7941 Tree Lane Suite 200
Madison WI 53717