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.
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