Intellisense and the psychology of typing

[andrew.queisser at hp.com]

Yesterday I typed in some C++ code that called a function with two
ints. Intellisense (auto-complete) helpfully told me that the first
formal parameter was called "frontLight" and the second "ringLight". It
occurred to me that I'm getting some semantic help here on top of the
obvious type safety. It seems to me that the existance of this kind of
support is tied to the static typing nature of  C++.

I've always been interested in the psychology behind those heated
"static" vs. "dynamic" (quotes to avoid another lengthy discussion
about manifest, latent, explicit, ...) typing debates. So I googled
"Intellisense static dynamic typing" and tried to get a view of the
collective mental landscape of this subject. It appears that the
threads that talk about Intellisense soon run dry. I'm wondering if
this is because:

1) Intellisense is really just another crutch that does more harm than
good? There were a few hardcore defenders of this position but not
many.

2) Intellisense is really useful but hard to implement well in IDEs for
dynamic languages? Can anyone comment on the status of
Intellisense-like tools for dynamic-language IDEs?

3) Users of dynamic languages are always developing/debugging running
programs where the current type of a variable is known and hence
Intellisense is possible again? My own limited experience with dynamic
languages (Ruby) is limited to edit-run cycles.

Any opinions?

Thanks,
Andrew