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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