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+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