+1  [A good informed response]
-glen


Gabriel wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 09:23:09AM -0500, Bill Dueber wrote:
> > There's a spectrum of how much an editor/environment can know about a
> > program. At one end is Smalltalk, where the development environment *is* the
> > program. At the other end is something like LISP (and, to an extent, Ruby)
> > where so little can be inferred from the syntax of the code that a "smart"
> > IDE can't actually know much other than how to match parentheses.
>
> You've never tried SLIME in Emacs.  All kinds of fancy LISPness for
> pretty much everything you mention below.
> > For languages where little can be known at compile time, an IDE may not buy
> > you very much other than syntax highlighting and code folding. For Java,
> > C++, etc. an IDE can know damn near everything about your project and
> > radically up your productivity -- variable renaming, refactoring,
> > context-sensitive help, jump-to-definition, method-name completion, etc. It
> > really is a difference that makes a difference.
> > 
> > I know folks say they can get the same thing from vim or emacs, but at that
> > level those editors are no less complex (and a good deal more opaque) than
> > something like Eclipse or Netbeans unless you already have a decade of
> > experience with them.
> 
> I guess I did say that, but I'd argue that the opacity depends 
> on your definition of opaque.  And I'd say it's more like five 
> years.  Vim4life!  :)
> 
> Gabriel