On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Darkseid <lorddae...@gmail.com> wrote: > Yes, yes, I know, I know. While I'm no vi or emacs guru, I've paired (for a > fair amount of time) with experienced VI and Emacs users. Snippets, Ctags > etc. help a great deal - but have you ever worked with an AST aware > development environment where you can safely make structural changes across > your entire codebase? > > Try extracting an Interface from a Class and replace all references to the > class with references to the interface across a 5000 class codebase by hand > in a few seconds, without a single error afterward. How about add a > parameter to a constructor, and have all references to said constructor > changed? You can do all that and more with IntelliJ. > > The thing is, code should be like clay in the hands of a hacker; the fact > that we have to deal with the AST via a text 'view' *really* slows us down. > We often hesitate to make necessary changes because the manual effort > involved in getting the refactoring done, and then testing it afterward for > bugs is non-trivial. Even a simple 'Rename Class' refactoring can become a > chore in a large codebase. > > The guys at Intentional and JetBrains are taking a serious shot at letting > us mould the AST directly - but until their efforts reach maturity, IntelliJ > is the closest we're going to get to it (and its going to be open source > soon). I'm happy to demo it sometime, too. Don't diss it until you've tried > it, preferably on a non toy project. >
Do I sense a pining for LISP here? AST, clay etc., ;) I have heard great things about IntelliJ IDEA. I'll give it a shot in my next Java foray. AFAIK, the open source, community edition of IDEA is going to have a subset of the features. _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list BangPypers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
